The gaming magazine is dead. After all, when was the last time that you were able to purchase a gaming magazine at your nearest newsagent? Games Workshop’s White Dwarf is of course the exception, but it has been over a decade since Dragon appeared in print. However, in more recent times, the hobby has found other means to bring the magazine format to the market. Digitally, of course, but publishers have also created their own in-house titles and sold them direct or through distribution. Another vehicle has been Kickststarter.com, which has allowed amateurs to write, create, fund, and publish titles of their own, much like the fanzines of Kickstarter’s ZineQuest. The resulting titles are not fanzines though, being longer, tackling broader subject matters, and more professional in terms of their layout and design.

—oOo—
Senet—named for the Ancient Egyptian board game, Senet—is a print magazine about the craft, creativity, and community of board gaming. Bearing the tagline of “Board games are beautiful”, it is about the play and the experience of board games, it is about the creative thoughts and processes which go into each and every board game, and it is about board games as both artistry and art form. Published by Senet Magazine Limited, each issue promises previews of forthcoming, interesting titles, features which explore how and why we play, interviews with those involved in the process of creating a game, and reviews of the latest and most interesting releases. Senet is also one of the very few magazines about games to actually be available for sale on the high street.

Senet Issue 12 was published in the autumn of 2023. It is, as the editorial notes, a post-UK Games Expo, and takes the time to highlight the pleasures of attending. It notes that the magazine is now quarterly, with the issue being its first autumn one. Then, as with previous issues, it gets on with highlighting some of the forthcoming games with its regular preview, ‘Behold’. There are two interesting titles featured here. One is Fateforge: Chronicles of Kaaan, a dungeon-crawler based on the Fateforge setting from Studio Agate, which is designed to be replayable, and tell a story in an hour, whilst the other is Fighting Fantasy Adventures. Designed by Martin Wallace, this implements the the Fighting Fantasy series of solo game books into a board game, with the base game adapting the first four. This is not the first time that titles in the series have been adapted into a board game, but this will be an ongoing line, with further releases adapting other books.

‘Points’, the regular column of readers’ letters, contains a mix of praise for the magazine and a discussion of gaming culture, including representation in the hobby and the appeal of co-operative games. Just four letters, so it does not seem enough. As with the previous issues, there is scope here for expansion of this letters page to give space to more voices and readers of Senet. One way of doing that is perhaps to expand it when ‘For Love of the Game’ comes to end. This regular column continues the journey of the designer Tristian Hall towards the completion and publication of his Gloom of Kilforth. In this entry of his column, he explores artistic instinct versus making a marketable game and making it marketable by giving a design a clear and easily grasped name. Surprisingly, the column is more interesting than those from previous issues, but the column continues to feel played out and flaccid.

The format for Senet is now tried and tests. Two interviews, one with a designer, one with an artist, and one article exploring a game mechanic whilst another looks at a game theme. The subject of the interview in ‘Ingenious’ by Matt Thrower, is the prolific Reiner Knizia, designer of titles such as High Society, Lost Cities, and Tigris and Euphrates. The interview handily covers Knizia’s time in the industry and how it has changed, how he developed the co-operative design with 2000’s Lord of the Rings years before it became fashionable, and how he likes auctions as a mechanism. It is accompanied by statistics that break down his games by mechanic used, themes applied, and games and awards by year. It barely touches upon the wide range titles that Knizia has created over the years, which would surely be worthy of a book of their own. It is solid and informative, though of course, some of the answers will be familiar from other interviews given Knizia’s fame.

‘Playing with Dinosaurs’ by Dan Thurot explores our fascination with dinosaurs and their being regularly featured in board game designs. The article has two ends of the spectrum to look at when it comes to dinosaurs and board games. At the one end is the ‘Rule of Scientific Accuracy’, whilst at the other is the ‘Rule of Cool’. Our fascination means that we typically want the latter rather than the former in our games, whilst at the same time being fascinated scientifically with dinosaurs, their evolution, and our discovery of their fossil remains. Dinosaur Island—an obvious nod to Jurassic Park—from Pandasaurus Games leans into the latter, whilst Dominant Species from GMT Games, adheres to the former. The games that stick to the ‘Rule of Scientific Accuracy’ tend to be drier and more complex, but also often encompass a second theme and that ‘evolution’. It includes a scale that measures various titles according to how heavy or light they are, and whether they are cool or scientific.

The issue’s second interview is with Vincent Dutrait. In ‘The Escape Artist’, Dan Jolin talks to the artist for board games such as Oltréé, Tribes of the Wind, and Museum, about his work process and how he approached the various projects he has worked. The article, of course, showcases Dutrait’s artwork as well, but without the trade dress for the particular games. The artwork is stunning and just shows how we as board game players have been spoilt in modern times.

Alexandra Sonechkina’s ‘Area of Conflict’ examines the theme of area control, pointing out that it is one of the most popular and most aggressive game mechanics. The starting for the area control mechanic is games such as Risk and Diplomacy, wargames by any other name, but beyond that, the mechanic allows for easy awareness of the state of play and who is in the lead and the potential for negotiation. Although the article begins with these designs and both their inherently combative and confrontational natures, it explores how designers have pulled away from those natures to make the mechanic less obvious or direct. For example, Martin Wallace’s Discworld: Ankh-Morpork shifts the winning conditions to secret objectives that differ between the players. However, as much as designers do pull away from the combative and confrontational nature of the mechanic, the article including a world tour of some of the most titles to employ it, they cannot truly escape it, something that the author makes clear. The result is not quite as satisfying a read in comparison to previous articles on game mechanics.

‘Unboxed’, Senet’s reviews section covers a wide range of games. This incudes League of the Lexicon, a particularly hard quiz and word game about language; Undaunted: Battle of Britain, which brings the the highly regarded World War II squad-level combat mechanics to defending Britain in 1940 in the air; the re-issue and redesign of the classic game of the Wars of the Roses, Kingmaker; and Library Labyrinth, in which a cast of fantastic fictional and historical women attempt to put escaped literary horrors back in their books! Which is an amazing theme. ‘Senet’s top choice’ is Moon, the Science Fiction hand drafting, Moon-base building sequel to Villagers and Streets. Once again, the reviews section of Senet shows off a wide range of different games for different tastes and play styles in just a few pages. The magazine could easily expand this section or do a whole separate publication of reviews of this quality.

As is traditional, Senet Issue 12 comes to a close with the regular end columns, ‘How to Play’ and ‘Shelf of Shame’. For ‘Confessions of a bad board gamer’, Alexandra Sonechkina’s ‘Unboxing Clever’ looks at the problems that come after unboxing a game and that is how to get everything back into the box. There are a lot of useful tips here. Efka Bladukas of No Pun Intended pulls an absolute classic off his shelf for ‘Shelf of Shame’. This is El Grande, an area control game already discussed in the earlier article on the area control mechanic. He discovers that it is an absolute classic, despite its theme of colonialism and worth his time having played it.

Physically, Senet Issue 12 is very professionally presented and shows off the board games it previews and reviews to great effect. Unfortunately none of the articles stand out, so unlike in previous issues there is nothing to elevate beyond a stolidly enjoyable read.

The What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System Starter Box is different to almost any other start set that you can imagine. This is because most other starter sets, such as the Pendragon Starter Set, the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Starter Set, or the Alien Starter Set, all typically introduce both a setting and a set of rules. Together with their dice, their adventures, their maps, and their characters sheets, they are designed to introduce a particular setting and the rules to roleplay within that setting. The What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System Starter Box does some of that, but it does it a bit differently and it does a bit more. The What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System Starter Box is designed to introduce the What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System—also known as WOIN—but where the other starter sets introduce setting specific rules, What’s OLD is NEW is generic. And where other starter sets introduce the one setting, the What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System Starter Box introduces three, and not only that, in doing so, introduces three different genres. Medieval fantasy, modern action, and Science Fiction. Published by EN Publishing following a successful Kickstarter campaign, the What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System Starter Box contains a sixty-eight page ‘What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System Starter Box Rulebook’, three twenty-page adventures—one each for the starter set’s three genres, three double-sided battle maps, over sixty tokens for the eighteen characters the monsters encountered in the three scenarios, eighteen pre-generated character sheets—six each for the three scenarios, and a set of eight six-sided dice.

The first book in the What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System Starter Box is the ‘What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System Starter Box Rulebook’. It opens in breezy fashion, introducing the game, roleplaying, and the various genres supported for What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay by the publisher, in particular, the three genres supported by this starter set. It explains the core mechanics and supports it all with an example of play. A Player Character in What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System has ten attributes: Strength, Agility, Endurance, Intuition, Logic, Willpower, Charisma, Luck, Reputation, and Power. These and skills are defined by the number of dice assigned to them. Thus, a Character might have an Agility of three and Lockpicking of two, plus an Exploit or item of equipment which grants a bonus die each. Thus, on most occasions, when the character wants to break open a safe or unlock a cell door, his player rolls six dice. The aim is to roll equal to, or higher than, a Target Number. This is ten for Easy, fifteen for Hard, twenty for Difficult, and so on. Bonus or penalty dice can be added depending upon the circumstances. In the What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System Starter Box rules, Luck dice can be spent on a one-for-one basis to reduce damage suffered, whereas there are more uses for Luck in the WOIN core rules.

Combat uses the same mechanics, but the Target Numbers are determined by the opponent’s Melee Defence, Ranged Defence, Mental Defence, and Vital Defence, depending upon the form of attack. Combatants get to actions per turn, which can any combination of movement, attacks, or other action, including repeating them. Some actions, such as emergency healing or picking a lock take two actions. The rules cover aiming, overwatch, and suppressive fire as well as area of effect attacks and called shots. The latter imposes a two dice penalty on attacks, but the creatures listed in the latter half of the ‘What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System Starter Box Rulebook’ do have ‘Called Shot’ location entries if a Player Character is successful in targeting them. Damage is determined by the weapon or attack type and the result deducted from the defendant’s Health. If reduced to zero, this will destroy objects and incapacitate or kill defendants. The number of dice rolled to attack can be reduced on a one-for-one basis to increase the number of damage dice rolled. For larger creatures, such as dragons, damage suffered is reduced by their Soak value, and armour worn by Player Characters and NPCs does the same.

The rules in the ‘What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System Starter Box Rulebook’ also cover scanning, searching, and tracking, countdowns, and supernatural powers. Depending on the genre and theme, this encompasses magic, psionics, and chi. All three use Power Points, derived from the Power attribute. Magic is designed to be freeform, so that a spellcaster can enhance a spell’s range, area of effect, duration, damage or healing done, protection provided, and number of creatures summoned, all depending upon the type of spell and the number of Power Points spent. The roll to cast the spell is based on the Player Character’s Power attribute and skill value in the type of magic. Psionics is not as flexible, the various disciplines, such as Clairvoyance, Telekinesis, or Teleportation, being treated as exploits, whilst Chi requires a Player Character to enter a Stance, which is a free action and costs a Power Point to enter and then a Power Point per turn to maintain. In comparison to magic, the descriptions of Psionics and Chi do feel underwritten and rely much more upon the character sheets for the respective scenarios.

Penultimately, ‘What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System Starter Box Rulebook’ gives a list of equipment, which gives some surprisingly fantastical items such as a mithril shirt, laser watch, and telekinetic gauntlets, along with their prices. (In case you are wondering what a mithril shirt goes for in the What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System, it is 10,500 gold crowns.) Lastly, over half of the book is a bestiary, from Bandit, Battlepsyche, and Bear to Woodland Creature, Xenomorph, and Zombie, for a total of forty creatures.

The What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System Starter Box comes with three separate scenarios. The fantasy scenario is ‘Dilemma & Decay’. The Player Characters accidentally end up in the town of Farrington in the Vale of Two Ridges which has been beset by the spread of a foul blight from a nearby swamp. The warlord, Overlord Steelheart persuades the Player Characters to investigate and doing so, encounter refugees and evidence of the bog blight everywhere, all before facing the source. ‘Habits and Happenstance’ is the modern-set scenario. It is an exciting tale of city power-politics set in Boston where there is a fight to redevelop and stop the redevelopment of the city’s old underground network of tunnels into a modern transport system, whilst attacks on innocent people are on the rise across the city. This is an action-packed, cinematic affair involving nuns on motorbikes and nests of vampires with some exciting chases thrown into the mix.

The Science Fiction scenario is ‘The Silence of Zephdon Station’. The crew of the Murphy answer a distress call from the station and are then offered a generous reward from a corporate A.I. to answer the call and investigate. Once aboard the station, there are signs of a fight and when the Murphy is sabotaged, the Player Characters will have to investigate further to discover who is responsible and why. There is more to the mission than at first sight, and there is also a lot of ways in which it can play out, such that its climax is highly player dependant and lot more flexible than the other two scenarios. All three scenarios can be played through in a session or two, or lengthened with the included optional scenes, and all involve a good mix of action and roleplaying. One issue with the scenarios is that possible motivations for the Player Characters to get involved are printed in the scenario booklets rather than on the characters sheets. Of the three scenarios, ‘Habits and Happenstance’ is the most fun and likely the easiest to run because of its cinematic styling.

To support the three scenarios, the What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System Starter Box includes set of eight six-sided dice in bright red, eighty counters to represent the Player Characters, NPCs, creatures, and monsters, three double-sided map sheets, and eighteen character sheets, six each for the three scenarios included in the box. In turn, they depict the region around the settle of Farrington and a set of ruins, a railway depot and a train station, and a research complex and an open area. The character sheets are single-sided and presented in landscape format.

For ‘Dilemma & Decay’, there is a Dwarven thief, an Elven musketeer with an actual musket, a pyrokinetic wizard, a knight in shining armour, a herbalist and cleric with a hatred of the undead, and an Orc berserker. For ‘Habits and Happenstance’, there is a British ex-spy, a thief with a cybernetic arm, a retired soldier cloned from Theodore Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart, a martial artist monk, a mutant leaper, and a crooked ex-cop turned private eye. For ‘The Silence of Zephdon Station’, there is a Russian smuggler and pilot, an Ogron mercenary, an android medica and science officer, a star knight complete with laser sword, a feline cat-burglar, and a drunken psychic.

Physically, the What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System Starter Box is well presented and easy to read. The artwork is at least decent throughout, if not excellent, though it does need an edit in places. ‘Dilemma & Decay’ suffers from a lack of proofreading in particular.

The What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System Starter Box is a better introduction to the What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System than it is to roleplaying in general, because it races through first principles to really introduce roleplaying effectively. Nevertheless, what it offers is an introduction to not just the mechanics of What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System, but three different settings with its three scenarios each of which neatly showcases what the system can do. Thus, What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System Starter Box is a solid introduction to the What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System that experienced roleplayers will pick up with ease and get playing very quickly.

 A special Kickstart Your Weekend this week. Last week, I mentioned a new DC Heroes Kickstarter on the way. Well, it launched on Monday, and it has already blown through all its stretch goals, and now they are making new ones. 

So, this Kickstarter doesn't really need my help. 

But anyone who spends any time here at all knows about my deep love for all things DC Comics. So they might not need my help, but I am giving it anyway!  And what better way to do it than to dust off some characters! Well. Not so much dust off, as in recreate. I will get my old V&V character up soon, but I have been thinking a lot about my occult investigative agency A.R.T.E.M.I.S. and how it might exist in other game settings. So you know what I am going to do here. 

For this one, I pulled out my Batman Role-Playing Game, which is DC Heroes 1.5 or something like that. I have (or had, I think I loaned it out) the 1st Ed boxed set, and I was trying to decide if I want the 1st or 2nd ed boxed set from the Kickstarter. I think I am going with 2nd Ed.  I had 3rd Ed for a while, but I know I sold that at my local game auction.

So who is this Larina? 

The game is dated from 1989, back when Bat-Mania was at its height. So I am making this a 19-year old Larina (1989). The obvious comparisons are her Chill stats (still need to post them) and my recent R.I.P. Horror Role-playing project. This Larina is a little different from her R.I.P. counterpart though they are about the same age (19 vs 22). Is that a Crisis On Infinite Earths potential adventure I hear? 

For DC Heroes, new heroes always start out with 450 APs. I bump it up to 500 because I like a little more power. This is magic rich world, so my magic characters need a boost.

Larina Nix AKA Nix the Witch

Dexterity:2  Strength:1 Body:2Intelligence:6Will:5Mind:4Influence:3Aura:5Spirit:7

Initiative: 11
Hero Points: 50

Current Body: 2
Current Mind: 4
Current Spirit: 7

Alter Ego: Larina Nichols
Occupation: Student/Research Librarian, Gotham University
Marital Status: Single
Known Relatives: Stephani Nichols (Mother), Lars Nichols (Father)
Group Affiliations: A.RT.E.M.I.S.
Base of Operations: Gotham City
Motivation: Responsibility of Power
Wealth: 5
Height: 5'4"
Weight: 124 lbs
Eyes: Blue
Hair: Red

Skills
Artist (Music) 2 [13]
Charisma 2 [32]
Medicine 2 [17]
Occultist 9 [101]

Powers
Flight (Broom) 5 [25]
Force Shield [10]
Magic Blast [20]

Advantages
Area Knowledge (Gotham) [20], Attractive [15]. Connection (Occult Underworld) [10], Gadget/Artifact (Broom) [25], Luck [15], Scholar [10]

Drawbacks
Arch Enemy (Mordru) [15], Secret Identity [10]

Equipment
Broom (Body 1, Fly 5 [10]) [25] (can fly at about 50 mph)

--

Ok, so who is this?

This Larina is still young. Honestly, this version would work better as a Teen Titan, which would work well with the 1st Edition boxed set.

I might adjust her wealth down to 4. I also need to remember how to give her some more languages. I also decided against the edgy notion of having her parents dead. Been there, done that, no need to go back. 

I put her in Gotham as a nod to my copy of the Batman RPG and my undying love for the Caped Crusader. In D&D, her alignment is Lawful Neutral, so she would be an agent of Law here. Not civil law, but Universal and Magic Law. This would make her the natural target of the likes of Mordru. Also, Mordru scared the shit out of me when I got one of my first DC comics. I must have been 5 or 6. So yeah, he is a great Arch Enemy for my witch here. While his modern look is likely the better one, I tend to go with his classic crazy-looking wizard look from his first appearance. Plus, I am rereading all of Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion books, so the battle of Law vs Chaos is very much on my mind right now.

I want to get my V&V version of Johan ported over, and I have a few others in mind. I am thinking of something like Justice League Dark but with my band of characters here. I guess that means I will need versions of Dracula and the Refrigerator, too.  I'd love to find a copy of "Blood of Heroes" from Pulsar Games. It was the same system with more magic. If I do, then I need to update her stats. Maybe Larina as a 30-year-old, really powerful witch. 

She has an alter ego, but I have never had a great "Superhero" name for her. Later, she is known as "Witch Queen," but at this point, she is still figuring things out.

I am backing the Kickstarter. Great to see a "new" DC game out there. 

There are many gamers who will tell you that it was Vampire the Masquerade that got them into roleplaying. That was in the 1990s. There are many gamers who will tell you that it was Dungeons & Dragons that got them into roleplaying. That was in the 1970s and of course, ever since... There are many gamers who will tell you that it was another phenomenon, of the 1980s, that got them into gaming, certainly if they are British, that of the Fighting Fantasy™ solo roleplaying books. Created in 1982 by Sir Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson with the publication of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, in the thirty years since, some sixty or so titles have published in the series and some seventeen million copies have been sold. In their time, the Fighting Fantasy™ series has produced bestsellers, computer games, board games, and of course, a dedicated fan base. In 2014, the series finally received the history book it deserved with the publication of You Are The Hero: A History of Fighting Fantasy™ Gamebooks and now, a decade on, there is a follow-up.

Magic Realms: The Art of Fighting Fantasy is a celebration and exploration of the pictorial presentation of the Fighting Fantasy series, for it was not famed for its accessibility and innovative format—and of course, its fantastic stories, but also its art and illustrations. Beginning with Peter Andrew Jones’ cover for The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, which stood out on the bookshelves for its then radical composition, and the internal illustrations by the late Russ Nicholson, the series introduced readers to a wide array of artists and illustrators, styles, and striking images, across the many genres that the series would encompass. In particular, the pen and inks of Nicholson would create the look of the series’ titular character, Zagor the Warlock, as well as others, but in particular, his artwork added so much to the look and feel of the series. Not just horror and fear, but the idea that monsters could be doing something other facing the brave adventurer as his player leafed through the pages of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. Dwarves playing cards and drinking into their cups, bored Goblins waiting for something to happen, a man having fallen asleep and being guarded by his dog. Yet the horror comes to the fore with images like the decomposing ghoul reaching to grab and rend the skin of the adventurer or the partially unwrapped mummy climbing over its saprophagous to attack the adventurer. Though the Fighting Fantasy series was aimed at a young teenage audience, its artwork was not. It never infantilised its fantasy, but instead, it was grim and gritty, savage and scary, enticing and exciting, and it remains so today. All of these pieces of artwork—and more—are given space in Magic Realms: The Art of Fighting Fantasy, which highlights the work of over forty artists in its pages.
Published by Unbound, and written by Sir Ian Livingstone and Jonathan Green—who previously collaborated on You Are The Hero: A History of Fighting Fantasy™ Gamebooks, what Magic Realms: The Art of Fighting Fantasy does is bring together the work of some thirty or artists who worked on the Fighting Fantasy series and more. Sir Ian Livingstone provides a foreword in which discusses his pleasure of working with so many great artists, Iain McCaig in particular, and also highlights out how artwork and artists in the series crossed over from other genres. For example, Jim Burns with his cover for both Freeway Fighter and the Games Workshop board game, Battlecars, and comic book artist Brian Bolland with his cover for Appointment with F.E.A.R. and for the Games Workshop board game, Judge Dredd: The Game of Crime-Fighting in Mega-City One (recently republished by Rebellion), as well as, of course, as his work on 2000 AD. This fostered a degree of synergy between the different genres and media, and the Fighting Fantasy series and Games Workshop beyond what was already there. Jonathan Green provides a more straightforward introduction.
Then from Chris Achilléos, Robert Ball, and Krisztián Balla to Duncan Smith, Greg Staples, and Gary Ward and Edward Crosby, Magic Realms presents the art of some thirty artists. Every artist gets to talk bout their involvement in the series and working with the commissioning editor, or many cases, the author, and the fantastic pieces they contributed. Some of the write-ups about the artists are more overviews, drawing retrospectively on older interviews, such as with Brian Bolland and Martin McKenna. Each is accompanied by the illustrations themselves. In fact, several pages of them, and typically longer than the interview. These begin with the artist’s most well-known pieces, such as Chris Achilléos’ wraparound cover to Titan: The Fighting Fantasy World, Robert Ball’s cover to the Scholastic Books’ version of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, John Blanche’s cover to The Shamutani Hills, the cover to The Caverns of the Snow Witch, and the cover to Scorpion Swamp and Fighting Fantasy: The Introductory Role-Playing Game by Duncan Smith. This is followed by a gallery of smaller images, a mixture of colour and black and white, depending on the artist. None of the art here is straight reproduction of Fighting Fantasy covers—that comes later in Magic Realms—but the art sans the titles, author names, and trade dress. Thus, artwork here can be seen in all of its glory.
Almost three quarters of Magic Realms: The Art of Fighting Fantasy is devoted to these artists, but they are not the only ones. The contributions of another twenty-artists, such as Dave Carson, Maggie Keen, Steven Lavis, and Brian Williams are acknowledged, as the artists on the overseas editions of the series. The latter highlights art that is likely to be familiar to most readers, unless that is, they are ardent fans or collectors of the Fighting Fantasy series, so it often brings a fresh perspective upon books with covers have long associations and are firmly cemented in the imagination of the English-speaking fan of the Fighting Fantasy series. This includes artwork from Brazil, Denmark, and France. All of covers are reproduced for the series, including those published by Puffin Books, Wizard Books, Scholastic Books, and overseas editions. There is a gallery of every cover of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain in every language, too, but that is not all. Magic Realms: The Art of Fighting Fantasy comes to a close with galleries for Warlock: The Fighting Fantasy Magazine—surely due a reprint anthology, the Fighting Fantasy graphic novels, and the miniature figures. These are lovingly presented here, stunningly painted and superbly bringing the art to life in three dimensions and making the reader wish they could bring them to the gaming table.
Physically, Magic Realms: The Art of Fighting Fantasy is exactly what you want it to be. The perfect reproduction of art accompanied by some interesting words.
There can be no doubt that Magic Realms: The Art of Fighting Fantasy is an absolute must for any fan of the Fighting Fantasy series. It shines a spotlight on both the many great artists who brought to life the words of the Fighting Fantasy authors and the great choices made by authors and editors in selecting the artists, whilst for the reader there is the thrill of being able to see all of the Fighting Fantasy all in one place and the frisson of excitement at the memory of seeing it for the first time.

 What have I been doing? Well this last Gary Con (back in April) I was talking with my Elf Lair Game co-conspirators about future projects. Of course our plans revolved mostly around the recently released Thirteen Parsecs. But I also began flipping through the "new to me" physical copy of the ShadowDark RPG. I had picked up the Quickstart and the Curse Scroll #1 zine at a previous Gary Con, so it seemed right to grab it then too. Originally my plan was only to use it as a supplement for my Old School Essentials games. But others encouraged me to try it out on it's own merits. 

It finally clicked with me one evening this past summer while making dinner what ShadowDark actually is and not what I thought it was. Granted, it is exactly what the video creator Kelsey Dionne has been saying for two years. So I sat down that night during my writing time and put together an outline. I gave myself one week. Well...that week went on, and on, as I really grew to like this project. So now I am ready to reveal the fruits of those efforts. Or at least reveal that I am revealing it.

Coming soon (next month or so), The Witch Book of Shadows for the ShadowDark RPG!

From the upcoming DriveThruRPG page:

Included here is the Witch Class.

- Six new ancestries
- New occult backgrounds
- Basic, Expert, and Advanced witch talents that grow as you level up.
- Thirteen Witch Patrons, from Baba Yaga to Xthluhu the Horror of the Deep! Each with boons and spells.
- 160+ new occult spells for ShadowDark, including special Patron Spells and Ritual Magic spells.
- 60+ Witch-related monsters for your ShadowDark adventures
- 40 new magic items. 
-124 pages A5 size to fit with your current ShadowDark RPG booksCompatible with ShadowDark and other ShadowDark products.

The biggest selling point for this book are all the new spells. Plus every witch takes a patron which opens new and unique spells to them. Add ritual spells and no two witches are ever the same.  There are thirteen new witch patrons as well.

For the monsters, well, many of these came from my recent Horror movie marathon. Going back to the roots of AD&D monsters and then rebuilding them from the ground up, or at least getting a head start from horror movies, gave me plenty of new ideas—so many that a few didn't make the cut and will be featured on a few Monstrous Mondays. 

Right now I am just waiting on the print proofs. Once I have those in hand (expected by Dec 1) then I will figure out what needs to happen next. 

As always, I had a blast working on this one, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did putting it together. 

Special thanks to Kelsey Dionne for not just making such a fun game, but building a great community and a sense of community involvement with this game. That might be her best achievement yet.

NOTE: My oldest has been running his Sunday group through all the editions of D&D. I have been planning on doing something with the Cook/Marsh Expert set, but schedules being a thing I have had to adapt and now do a Companion-level adventure.

One thing led to another, and now I have a new, different project on my hands. 

Today is my "Day 1" of it. The day I start pulling together research notes into a draft. 

I put this post together as a set of notes and research from previous posts. 

No. I am not doing my own Companion set. As I have outlined below we have plenty very good ones.

D&D Companion Set

The Companion Edition of D&D was one of the near-mythical books for me growing up.  As I mentioned yesterday that I began my game playing with the Basic/Expert, known today as B/X, sets from the early 80s.  The expert took the game from the 3rd to the 14th level, and the Companion book was then going to take the game from the 14th to the 36th level.  Even though I knew of AD&D at the time, I thought the Companion book would be the way to go. So I waited for it.

And waited.

And waited some more.

Finally, I gave up waiting and dove into AD&D instead, leaving Basic D&D behind.  Eventually, a Companion Rules Set came out.  But it was for the new Mentzer-edited Basic set (now called BECMI), and I no longer had any interest in it, having discovered the world could also have Assassins, half-orcs, and 9 alignments.

Fast forward to the Old School Revolution/Renaissance/Resurgence/Recycled and I have re-discovered the Basic sets (all of them) in their imperfect glories.  And I am not the only one that must have felt a little gipped by not getting a Companion book for B/X.

Jonathan Becker over at B/X Blackrazor designed his own Companion rules. If it is not exactly what the companion would be, it is really close.

Soon after, I managed to pick up my copy of the Companion Set.  So join me on my exploration of the new worlds of the D&D Companion Set.  But a warning, here there be Dragons!

D&D Companion Set (1984)

I don't think it is too much to say that the Companion Set contains some of the most interesting changes and updates to the D&D than any other product TSR had published to date.  I will talk more about these in the review, but first a look back.

I have eagerly awaited the Companion set for D&D ever since I got my Expert Set, which is by B/X Moldvay/Cook Basic and Expert Set.

The Companion Set, as promised by the Expert Set rules, mentions that characters will now go to 36th level and there will be a way to cure undead level drain!  Such promises. Such hope!

D&D Cook/Marsh Expert Set, page X8

I did manage to read it once.  I was in college, and it was at Castle Perilous Games in Carbondale. Of course, AD&D 2nd Ed was the new hotness at the time, and I had no desire to look backward.  What I saw, though, at the time did not impress me.  The entire Mentzer set at the time (AT THE TIME, mind you) made me think of it as D&D for little kids (now I see it differently).

Looking back now, I see I made a BIG MISTAKE.
Well...maybe.  I would not have traded my AD&D time for anything, but I wish I had given the BECMI rules more chance.

Now I can fix that.

Today I am going to cover the BECMI Companion Rules.  I am going to cover both the DriveThruRPG PDFs and my physical box set.


The Companion Set follows the rules as presented in the BECMI Basic and Expert books. But unlike those books, the Companion Rules sets off into uncharted directions and gives us some new material.

While the claim can be made that Frank Mentzer only edited and organized the Basic and Expert rules based on previous editions, the Companion set is all his.  While there may be some influences from earlier editions such as Greyhawk (with it's 22nd level cap [wizards] and some monsters) and AD&D (some monsters and the multiverse) this really feels new.

Companion Player's Book 1
The player's book is 32 pages with color covers and black & white interiors. Art by Larry Elmore and Jeff Easley.
Opening this book we get a preface with a dedication to Brian Blume. A nice touch and yeah he is often forgotten in the tale of D&D's earliest years.  The preface also firmly situates us in time. We 10 years out from when D&D was first published. The design goals of this book, and consequently this series, have never been more firmly stated.  This is an introduction to the D&D game and designed to be fun, playable, and true to the spirit of D&D.  It certainly feels like this is the successor to the Original D&D game; maybe more so than AD&D.
One page in and we are off to a great start.

The title and table of contents page tell us that this game is now "by" Frank Mentzer, based on D&D by Gygax and Arneson.  As we move into the book proper we get a feel for the "changing game."  Characters are more powerful and once difficult threats are no more than a nuisance or exercise.  The characters are ready to take their place among the rulers of the world.  This makes explicit something I always felt AD&D only played lip service to.

We get some new weapons that have different sorts of effects like knocking out an opponent or entangling them. We also get some unarmed combat rules.    Now, these feel they really should have been added to the Basic or Expert rule sets. Maybe they were but were cut for space or time.

Up next is Stronghold management from the point of view of the player characters.  Again here D&D continues its unwritten objective of being educational as well as fun.  More on this in the DM's book.

Character Classes
Finally, about 11 pages in we get to the Character updates.  Here all the human character classes get tables that go to level 25; again maybe a nod to Greyhawk's level 20-22 caps, and caps of 7th level spells (clerics) and 9th level spell (magic-users).  Clerics get more spells and spell levels.  The big upgrade comes in the form of their expanded undead turning table.  Clerics up to 25th level and monsters up to Liches and Special.  This mimics the AD&D Clerics table; I'd have to look at them side by side to see and differences.  One difference that comes up right away is the increase in undead monsters.  There are phantoms, haunts, spirits, and nightshades.  Nightshades, Liches, and "Special" will be detailed in the Master Set.

Something that is big pops up in the cleric listing.  A Neutral cleric of level 9 or higher may choose to become a Druid! Druids only resemble their AD&D counterparts in superficial ways.  They have similar spells, but the BECMI Druid cannot change shape.  It is an interesting implementation of the class, and I'll discuss it in detail.

Arguably it is fighters that get the biggest boost in the Companion Set.  They gain the ability to have multiple attacks per round now and other combat maneuvers such as smashing, pairing and disarming. This is a big deal since they got so little in the Expert set. Fighters can also "specialize" into three paths depending on alignment.  There are Knights, Paladins, and Avengers.  Each type gives the fighter something a little extra.  Paladins are not very far off from their AD&D counterparts and Avengers are as close to an Anti-Paladin as D&D will get until we get to the Blackguards.

Conversely, Magic-users do not get as much save from greater spells. We do get the restriction that any spell maxes out 20dX damage.

Thieves can now become Guildmasters or Rogues.  A name that will come up more and more with future editions of D&D.

BECMI "Prestige Classes?"
The Druid, Knight, Avenger, Paladin, and, to a lesser degree, the Magist and Rogues represent what could arguably be called the first Prestige Classes to D&D.  Their inclusion predates the publication of the Thief-Acrobat in the AD&D Unearthed Arcana.
Prestige Classes are classes that one can take after meeting certain requirements in other "base" classes in D&D 3.x and Pathfinder. Often at 10th level, but can occur anytime the character meets the requirements.  This concept is later carried on into D&D 4 with their "Paragon Paths" (chosen at 11th level) and even into D&D 5 with their subclasses (chosen at 2nd level).
The BECMI Avenger and Paladin are the best examples of these working just like the Prestige Classes will in 15 more years. This is interesting since it also means other classes can be added to the basic 4 core ones using the same system.  An easy example is the Thief-Acrobat from UA or even the Ranger from AD&D.  Though in this version the problem lies in the alignment system.  Rangers are supposed to be "good" for example.

Demi-Humans
Demi-humans may not advance any more in level, but they are not idle.  This is also the area of the Companion Set that I most often go wrong.  Each demi-human race has a Clan Relic, and some demi-humans could be in charge of these clan relics, making them very powerful. There are also clan rulers, and they are also detailed.  What does all that mean?  It means there is a good in-game reason why demi-humans do not advance in levels anymore.  They are much more dedicated to their clans than humans. So, after some time, they are expected to return home to take up their responsibilities for the clan.


That is not to say that these characters do not advance anymore.  Each demi-human race can still gain "Attack Ranks" as if they are still leveling up.  They don't gain any more HP, but they can attack as if they are higher-level fighters.  They also gain some of the fighter's combat options. Each class gets 11 such rank-levels.   It seems to split some hairs on "no more levels" but whatever.

We end with a map of the expanding Known World.  This is the continent of Brun of Mystara, but we don't know that yet.  But I will discuss that later this week.

This book is a lot more than I expected it to be and that is a good thing.

Companion DM's Book 2
The DM's book is 64 pages with color covers and black & white interiors. Art by Larry Elmore and Jeff Easley.
There is a lot to this book.  First, we get to some General Guidelines that cover the higher levels of play and planning adventures accordingly. There is sadly not a lot here.
We follow up with Part 2: The Fantasy World.  This continues some of the discussion of stronghold management and dominion management as well.  Now here is quite a bit of good information on what happens, or could happen, in a dominion. 
This section also includes the hidden secret of the D&D BECMI series.  The War Machine Mass Combat system.

War Machine
Around the same time, TSR also developed the BattleSystem Mass Combat system.  The two are largely incompatible with each other.  I always thought it was odd that two systems that do essentially the same things were created and incompatible.   Later I learned that D&D BECMI lived in what we like to call a "walled garden" in the business.  It was out there doing it's own thing while the "real business" of AD&D was going on.  The problem was that D&D Basic was outselling AD&D at this point.  This was not the first time that TSR would woefully misunderstand their customers, and sadly, it was not the last time either.
War Machine is elegant compared to BattleSystem. I am not saying it is simple, but the work involved is not difficult, and I am happy to say it looks like it will work with any edition of D&D.

The Multiverse 
A big part of any D&D experience is the Multiverse.  This section allows the DMs and Players to dip their toes into the wider Multiverse which includes the Ethereal Plane and the Elemental Planes.


Space is also given to the discussion on aging, damage to magic items, demi-human crafts, poison, and more. We also get all of our character tables.

Monsters
About halfway through the book, we reach the monster section. Many familiar AD&D faces are now here, though a bit of digging will show that many of these are also from OD&D up to the Greyhawk supplement. Most notable are the beholder, larger dragons, druids (as monsters), and many elemental types. Monsters are split into Prime Plane and Other Planes. 
Among the monsters featured are the aforementioned Beholder, larger Dragons, and bunches of new Undead, like haunts, druj, ghosts and more.  A few that caught my attention are the Gargantua (gigantic monsters) and Malfera.  The Malfera REALLY caught my attention since they are from the "Dimension of Nightmares."  This is more fodder for my Mystara-Ravenloft connection.
Monsters from the Other Planes focus on the Elemental planes.

Treasure
Lots of new treasures and magic items.

Adventures
There are three short adventure or adventure hooks for companion-level characters.

All in all the Companion Set is full and had many things I did not think it had given my very casual relationship to it over the years.  Reading it now and in-depth for the very first time I see there is a lot I could have used in my games back then.

Other Companion Books

I was not the only one that waited. 

Others came up with their own Companion rules for the B/X Style Basic D&D instead of the BECMI Style Basic D&D. Now...let's be 100% honest here. The differences between BX and BECMI are so subtle that only a huge nerd like me cares. But then again, I was not the only one.

I mentioned Jonathan Becker's B/X Companion above and I reviewed it a while back. It compares favorably to the BECMI Companion from TSR, and it fits the look and feel of the BX books well.

There was also the Companion Expansion from Barrataria Games, which was also quite good. It was more of a move from BX Basic D&D closer to AD&D, which is fine. It is also free, and all the content was released 100% under the Open Gaming License, so that was a nice plus in my mind.

And proving that sometimes the wait is good, Stephen R. Marsh, the Marsh of the Cook/Marsh Expert Set, is working on his own Companion set.  So I can have all three to satisfy that desire the 12-year-old-me had. 

It just goes to show how active the old-school D&D communities still are.

Some part of me still wants a proper B/X Companion set from 1982. Maybe such a thing existed in an alternate universe. But that is also a universe where the BECMI sets didn't exist, and given how popular Mentzer's red box was, I am unsure how it would have changed D&D as a whole in the mid- to late 1980s.

What Role Does the Companion Serve?

One has to ask. What does the Companion rules actually do? Or even what role does it serve?

In many ways, the Companion rules (and here on out, regardless of which one I mean) represent the fork in the road where D&D splits from AD&D.  With the continuum of OD&D to Holmes Basic to Moldvay and then Mentzer Basic, you could still go on to AD&D (largely as Gary would have liked). The Companion rules then are the path of no return. Once you head down that path there is no turning back for AD&D.  So the Companion needs to fill the same gaps that AD&D fills, but it doesn't need to do them in the same way.

For me, any discussion about the various merits of AD&D vs Basic-era D&D has to include a conversation about how the Companion (and Masters) handle various AD&D topics. The only problem is that no Companion development ever happened in a vacuum. 

Things like Druids, stronger monsters (notably elementals), the outer planes and their inhabitants, are all slightly different in the Companion rules. But rare are the entirely new elements. Granted, the BECMI Companion often has new monsters and the War Machine. The Companion Expansion from Barrataria Games was designed to fill in the gaps B/X had compared to AD&D. It is hard to throw off the shadow of AD&D. Though I would like to see something new. Something that AD&D would have to convert over from D&D for a change. But likely that time has long since passed. 

Should Classes Be Different?

One of the ideas floated by the BECMI Companion is that there are some classes, the Druid is my prime example, that act like Basic Prestige Classes. So, a neutral 9th-level cleric could now be considered a Druid if that is what the player wanted. Does that mean a Fighter then could be something else? Knights, Avengers, and Paladins are mentioned in BECMI. But would Rangers, Barbarians, and Cavaliers be out of the question?

While I would not want to recreate the Prestige Class bloat of the early 2000s, the idea is an intriguing one. Would my witch even be just a type of magic-user, then? 

Should Monsters Be Different?

My go-to here is the humble succubus. In Becker's Companion, she is a 7 HD monster. In BECMI, granted in the Immortal Rules, she is a whopping 15 HD (Whispering Demon in the Immortals boxed set). In Eldritch Wizardry (where she is introduced) and in AD&D she is 6+6 HD.  Obviously, for characters 15th level and higher, a single 6 or 7 HD succubus is not really a challenge unless she is played correctly in a non-combat role.

Other times, we get more powerful dragons and more powerful elementals. A 15 HD succubus may be a bad idea, but the 15 HD Queen of Succubi is better.

The threats need to be targeted to the level of the characters involved. 

Gives me a lot to think about.

The world is broken and everything is in a state of decay. The environment. The land itself. History. You and everyone around you. Your memories. Centuries ago, magic broke the world. It unravelled and with it the great civilisations that exist as memories of near forgotten tales and the artefacts that can be scavenged from the ruins. The gods died and fell from the sky. Their corpses lie where they fell, some worshipped by cults hoping that their faith will restore them to life, even as the corpses spawn strange creatures, trigger strange phenomena, and even still provide valuable resources despite the danger of living so close to them. Every magical artefact and every monster which ever wielded magic became one more vector for the Decay that corrupts and twists all it touches. Those who wield such artefacts or even dare to weave the frayed threads of magic that exist are in danger of becoming a thrall or Decay or poisoning those around you. Decay warps time and space, changing the environment around you are you travel and even changing the time that the journey took. Monsters are everywhere. Lastly there is the Decay within you, the twisting of the magic that runs through you. It is a Curse which threatens all of your kind. Humans rot and rise as soul-hungry undead; Dwarves burn up from the inside and become eternally burning infernos; Elves transform into crystal constructs that scour the skin from their victims; Halflings melt into living oozes; and the Forgotten crumble into nothing. Yet there is Hope.

Centuries since the Breaking, survivors still form communities, known as Havens, and invest their Hope in them. They invest their Hope in Survivors brave enough to travel the wilds and so enable them to fight back against the Decay, to hold back and even reverse its corrosive effects, and push them to great acts of heroism. Walking the land on the same paths and placing memorable Waymarkers can solidify the land against Decay, as can connecting communities and sharing stories with them. Memoria, carried by every Survivor on a journey can help them withstand the warping and loss of memories that if they were otherwise unprotected, they would suffer. Hope is all that stands between the Survivors and a world of entropy.

This is the setting for Broken Weave, a setting which the Survivors (as the Player Characters are known), “Survive, built community, and fight for hope in post-apocalyptic tragic fantasy world”. Published by Cubicle 7 Entertainment, it is designed to be compatible with Dungeon & Dragons, Fifth Edition and whilst it runs as a standalone, post-apocalyptic roleplaying setting, it could actually be mapped on the setting of the Game Master’s choice, so that the Survivors could be exploring the long decay remnants of a world that their players’ previous characters explored unaware of the disaster that was to come with the Breaking. However, there are some mechanical differences between Broken Weave and Dungeon & Dragons, Fifth Edition. These include Survivors being created via a Lifepath System, Lineages replacing Races, Feats being replaced by Talents and Inspiration by Hope, and a number of changes and additions to both the skills and the Toolkits that the Survivors have access to. In addition to spending Hit Dice to regain Hit Points as per normal in Dungeon & Dragons, Fifth Edition, but Broken Weave also offers another option which they can be spent. This varies between the different Classes.

Play begins with the creation of the Survivors’ community, their Haven. This is their base of operations, their home, and what they will be striving to protect and grow throughout a Broken Weave campaign. Consisting of the Founders’ Legacy, Location, Culture, Crises (current and past), and Finishing Touches, this can be created randomly using the given tables or designed. Either way, it is mean to be collaborative process between all of the players so that they have an investment in it. There are notes included alongside the process to suggest ways in which it can be twisted and changed to add detail and story possibilities. For example, this could be that Founders’ Legacy is not as pure the Survivors recall it to be or that the community could be home to a ‘Hard Luck Haven’, meaning that it starts with a higher level of Decay and increases the degree of challenge for both players and Survivors. Lastly, a Haven will have beginning values for Hope, Decay, Population, and Resources, based on the number of players. When a Haven suffers a crisis, its Resources will be first reduced and then its Population. This loss can be resisted, but if the Population is reduced to zero, the Haven is destroyed.

HAVEN: Flaming Lake
Our Founder Wanted To… Escape the monsters our families were becoming
LOCATION
Biome: Wetland Resource Abundance: Wood Resource Scarcity: Metal
Landmark: A vast lake of flammable liquid
CULTURE
We Value… Cleverness, subtlety, wit
Clothing and Appearance: We shave patterns into the sides or back of our hair
Traditions and Superstitions: We always save a bone for the beast and a drink for the lost
Leadership: Public votes are taken on all important matters, but the weight of your vote is reduced the more Decayed you are.

CRISES
Past Crises: The Haven could not safely expand any further. Some were exiled so the rest could live. A dangerous monster that was assembling a crude device or altar and had a weak point beneath its armour. Current Crisis: Every month a strange fog covers the Haven and all but one survivor falls unconscious for a seven days at a time.
Hope: 10
Decay: 1
Resources: 10
Population: 100

Survivor creation is also intended to be a collective process, essentially so that backgrounds and bonds can be created during the process. Each Survivor has a Lineage, each of which grants several advantages, but also a Curse and the way in which Decay affects you. Dwarves are beset by the Curse of Flame, Elves by the Curse of Earth, Halflings by the Curse of Water, Humans by the Curse of Wind, and The Forgotten by the Curse of Oblivion. Unlike the other four, The Forgotten are not a true Lineage, but are a mélange of the forgotten Lineages in the Broken World and vary greatly in appearance. In this way, they represent what might have been another species in the Dungeons & Dragons-style world from before the Breaking. The Lifepath for a Survivor determines his Family, Upbringing, Occupation, Defining Experience, Talent, Possessions, and Allies and Enemies.

Lineage: I Am A… Halfling
Parents: I Was Raised By… People of the same lineage
Influential Family Member: One Of My Family Members Is… Carrying on the family trade
Family Size: My Family Is… Small – Two members
Upbringing: My Upbringing Was… Dangerous. I always keep an eye out of trouble I Am… Use to fear
Occupation: I Am A… Scout I Am Skilled In… Stealth
Defining Experience: I… Cared for people when a plague spread through the community I Learned… Medicine
Life Lesson: You Learned… Some secrets of the Broken World others would rather ignore I Gained… +1 Intelligence
Starting Talent: Hurler
Possessions: Experience… I explored your Haven’s surroundings, foraging for supplies or mapping the area. I Gained… Seeker’s Tools, Herbalist’s Tools, or Prospector’s Tools
Allies and Enemies: I was raised with or taught by this ally and we have developed our skills together. My enemy believed it was my responsibility to care for them and that I failed

There are six Classes in Broken Weave. Harrowed tap into the corrupting force of Decay to protect others from its effects, but use its unnatural power to defend their Haven and protect their allies. Makers seek out old and new technology to use for the benefit of the Haven. Sages—scholars, chirugeons, and historians—harbour their knowledge and both use it to protect their Haven and to pass it on to others. Seekers walk the forgotten paths of the Broken World in search of lost Artefacts, so must guard against Decay even as they use the items they find to protect their Haven. Speakers are diplomats and storytellers who both build their Haven and travel to other communities strengthen the links between them as well as tell new histories and legends that can be remembered when memories have been lost. Wardens are protectors and guardians, equipped with ancestral arms and armour to defend themselves and the Haven. Attributes are assigned from a standard array and in the last steps, a player rolls for Dreams and Connections, as well as the Memoria that link the Survivor to his memories.

Each of the Lineages details what it was like before and after the Breaking, and then the nature of the Curse. This ranges between one and ten, and as it increases for a Survivor, it actually provides both bonuses and benefits. For example, the Halfling’s Curse of Water at a value of between four and seven, causes the sufferer’s skin to become translucent, malleable, and makes it difficult for him to interact with objects. He is at Disadvantage on Athletics Tests, but can use Acrobatics to initiate a Grapple attack and will be at Advantage for all Grapple Tests. Each of the Classes provides abilities at each and every Level and three subclasses. Of the latter, the Harrowed has Condemned, Harrowed, and Sovereign; the Maker has Alchemist, Artificer, and Smith; the Sage has Healer, Lorekeeper, and Veteran; the Seeker has Delver, Hunter, and Strider; the Speaker has Envoy, Preacher, and Whisperer; and the Warden has Avenger, Sentinel, and Warcaller. Whilst for the former, at Second, Sixth, Tenth, Fourteenth, and Eighteenth Levels, a Survivor gains a Talent, as well as the one gained during Survivor creation. Talents are not Feats. In fact, they are less powerful than the standard Feats of Dungeon & Dragons, Fifth Edition (though Broken Weave does allow the option for the players to select them as well). Many are specific to the Broken Weave setting, such as ‘Decay Resistance’, which grants Proficiency for Decay Saving Throws, ‘Decay Sense’, which grants Advantage on tests to determine if a creature is suffering from Decay and by how much, and ‘Built to Last’, which makes any Waymarkers constructed to mark a route more durable and resistant to Decay.

This is, of course, in addition to the actual Abilities for the Class. For example, at First Level, the Harrowed has ‘Delay the Inevitable’, ‘Embrace Entropy (1d10)’, and ‘Kindred Spirits’. ‘Embrace Entropy (1d10)’ lets the Harrowed harness the Decay to speed his recovery and heal Hit Points when he gains a point of Decay, ‘Delay the Inevitable’ grants Proficiency for Decay Saving Throws and slows the path of the Harrowed’s Lineage Curse, and ‘Kindred Spirits’ grants Advantage on Tests to determine the degree of Decay in an individual, creature, or an object, and even identify its source and location. In comparison, the Seeker begins with ‘Walk the Old Paths’ and ‘Lead the Way’. The latter means that the Survivor can ignore Difficult Terrain and grants Advantage on Tests related to the Outrider role in Journeys, whilst the former enable the Survivor to do the Place Waymarker Campcraft Activity and another Campcraft Activity, and search a previously placed Waymarker for the contents of a secret stash.

Decay is an ever-present threat in Broken Weave. Sources include arcane artefacts, corrupted lands, and monsters. In addition to the effect on a Lineage’s Curse, its effects can be memory loss. That though can be countered by a Memoria trinket, if the potential memory loss is associated with the trinket. Decay can also be reduced via certain Class features, along a particular route by completing the path as part of a journey, Moonstone can absorb Decay, placing and maintaining Waymarkers, and of course, rebuilding communities. Countering Decay is Hope. This is gained during Heaven creation, making a Noble Sacrifice, growing a Community, and overcoming a crisis. Hope is spent to gain an automatic success, to cheat death, to turn a successful attack into a Critical attack, recover from a condition, resist Decay, reroll a Test, take an extra Action, and to twist fate, forcing someone nearby to reroll a Saving Throw. It is lost if a Survivor dies in a manner that is not heroic, a crisis is failed, and when a Haven’s Decay increases.

Broken Weave includes detailed rules for journeys—no surprise given that the publisher developed them originally for The One Ring: Adventures Over The Edge Of The Wild and has already presented them for Dungeon & Dragons, Fifth Edition with Uncharted Journeys—and for the passage of time that encompass Campcraft, Downtime, and Seasonal Activities. There is a quite a range of activities here and they scale up in terms of scope and time. Thus, ‘Contemplate Scars’, ‘Gallows Humour’, ‘Listen’, ‘Record Knowledge’, and ‘Remember the Fallen’ all encourage good roleplaying during Campcraft times, whilst Downtime activities include ‘Build Defences’, ‘Craft Memoria’, ‘Establish Memoria’, ‘Maintain Waymarkers’, ‘Push Back Decay’, ‘Steer Decay’, and so on. Seasonal Activities include ‘Build a Home’, ‘Gather Survivors’, ‘Go to War’, and more. Then on top of that, the Survivors will ‘Invest in the Future’, which might be to ‘Retrain’, ‘Reinforce Waymarker’, ‘Start a Family’, or even ‘Retire’. Seasonal Activities end with a number of random events for the Survivors, the Haven, and Factions, which can be played as necessary, whether immediately or over the course of the next Season. Mechanically, a Haven is important as a source of resources, but as play progresses, they should become something more. That is, the means to pull the players and their Survivors into the world of Broken Weave, giving ways in which the Survivors can recover, improve themselves, and make the world a better place. This is enforced not just through the numerous types of activity that the Survivors can undertake in addition to adventuring, but also the abilities that Classes grant. For example, the Artificer subclass for the Maker gains ‘Mass Production’ to create blueprints and documentation that others can follow and build, either improving their defences or their standard of living, whilst ‘Enduring Lesson’ for the Sage means that his medicinal advice is noted down and standardised so that future Survivors begin play with an extra Hit Die!

In terms of an actual setting, Broken Weave provides a broad overview of its technology—as is, ruins, havens, daily life, and more. In terms of specific details, it describes the Haven of Guardian’s Lament, complete with the Founder’s Legacy, location, culture, influential people, crises past and present, and the immediate surrounding area. It is a lush oasis embraced within the arms of a fallen god amidst a barren desert. The legacy includes a shrine to the fallen god, which is also the Haven’s landmark, and the Haven has faced crises such as repelling invaders and dealing with an artefact that turned the inhabitants into cannibals. The artefact is buried in the ruins beneath the Haven. Currently, the Haven faces two crises. One are the voices heard from recently opened, but not yet explored ruins and warnings from refugees of a Titan on the march. Guardian’s Lament is designed as a both an example Haven and a starting Haven. Several others are also described, so that the Survivors can create paths to them and establish relations and so grow a wider community. Together this provides a framework for a campaign starter, but the Game Master could just as easily take the content and drop it in her own version of Broken Weave.

For the Game Master there is solid advice on running Broken Weave highlighting its themes of tragic fantasy and loss versus survival and hope. It also covers how to describe Decay, as well as advising using a location web to map the world and detailing several magical artefacts. These are powerful, but their use is not without consequences. For example, the Bowl of Plenty provides a ready source of food, but if eaten the food forces a Survivor to make a Saving Throw versus Decay and if they are widespread in a Haven, its Decay goes up season by season, whilst the Deathmarch Armour grants incredible Strength and protection, in the long term, it forces an automatic failed Death Save or Decay on the wear. The advantage of the armour is that the wearer would be able to face some of the toughest monsters in the Broken Weave. This applies to all of the magic items in Broken Weave and in many ways, the Survivors are really going to want to either avoid magical items or employ them sparingly.

Broken Weave also provides a nicely done bestiary including an NPCs, flora, fauna, monsters, and Titans. Of these, a monster is any creature overwhelmed by Decay, whilst Titans are colossal creatures that spread Decay and destruction wherever they go. Some believe them to be gods hollowed out by Decay and if ever a Haven stands in the path of Titan it is doomed. Broken Weave includes the means to adapt creatures from other Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition settings and sourcebooks, giving monsters the means of spreading Decay and Decay Transformations like ‘Blinking’ or ‘Volatile Blood’, as well as monsters specific to the setting. For example, the Deathstalk is ambush predator, a twisted sentient tree that shapes the paths in and around its forest grove to lead into the grove, whilst tempting its would be victims with the voices and memories harvested from its previous victims, using their decapitated heads as literal mouth pieces. The Shrieking Horror is an example of a monster inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, a hulking, multi-eyed, beaked beast with extra squawking beaks that run down its feathery chest and let out shrieks that can stun and deafen. It looks very much like a mutated Owl Bear!

Lastly, Titans get a section of their own. Their appearance nearby automatically triggers a crisis for a haven and the only response is to slay the beast, change its path, imprison it, or run. Every Titan is different and two are detailed in Broken Weave. Each is fully detailed in terms of its corruption and Decay, what is known about it and what is believed to be the best way to defeat it, and how it interacts with the world. The fulsome stats include Legendary actions in addition to the many traits and actions. The two Titans detailed are the Dreamer and the Rotbringer. The Decay from the Dreamer affects those that sleep and it can summon Dreamspawn from the those that sleep to appear near them, whilst the Rotbringer is a walking storm of Decay, spores, and sound. Both are incredibly tough and vile creatures and any group of players and their Survivors deserve all of the praise and glory they would get if they defeated one of these.

Physically, Broken Weave is well presented. The artwork is excellent, suitably a depicting world and its inhabitants and creatures changed by an apocalyptic event.

If there is an aspect of Broken Weave that is not as fully addressed as it could be, it is what Survivors are doing on adventures. The emphasis is rightly upon the Haven and protecting and improving it, on journeying between other Havens and building and enforcing communities through contact and confirmation of memories, all whilst withstanding the threat of Decay. What then of actual adventuring and exploring the world? If the world of the Broken Weave was a highly magical world before the Breaking as is suggested, what are the ruins leftover like and if there are dungeons, what they like in a world where Decay is prevalent? These are not questions addressed in Broken Weave, which is an oversight. It does not help that there is no adventure, ready-to-play, in the book. If there had, the question could have been answered there.

Lastly, it should be pointed out that magical apocalypses are not new to the hobby, though they are relatively rare. 2008’s Desolation from Greymalkin Designs explores a world just after the apocalypse, whilst the most obvious one, Earthdawn, is set centuries after the apocalyptic event. They are noticeably different in tone and outlook compared to Broken Weave though.

Broken Weave is a radically different setting for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. Its emphasis is on survival and community in a setting that is more environment and connections than a mapped-out world. It can be played as is, or it can be laid out over the ruins of an existing world, whether a pre-published or one of the Game Master’s own devising, enabling the players to roleplay Survivors potentially the secrets of the past and the secrets of past Player Characters. This gives it a high degree of flexibility as do the rules for Haven creation and improvement and monster modification, and that is in addition to the flexibility in terms of use of the actual setting material. Overall, Broken Weave is grim, yet heroically hopeful fantasy setting that emphasises togetherness and co-operation against the long-term effects of contemporary fears.

Now in its seventeenth year, Free RPG Day for 2024 took place on Saturday, June 22nd. As per usual, Free RPG Day consisted of an array of new and interesting little releases, which are traditionally tasters for forthcoming games to be released at GenCon the following August, but others are support for existing RPGs or pieces of gaming ephemera or a quick-start. This included dice, miniatures, vouchers, and more. Thanks to the generosity of Waylands Forge in Birmingham, Reviews from R’lyeh was able to get hold of many of the titles released for Free RPG Day.

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Dragonbane – The Sinking Tower is a preview of, and a quick-start for Dragonbane, the reimagining of Sweden’s first fantasy roleplaying game, Drakar och Demoner, originally published in 1982. Funded via a Kickstarter campaign by Free League Publishing in 2022, Dragonbane promises to be a roleplaying game of “mirth and mayhem”. It includes a basic explanation of the setting, rules for actions and combat, magic, the adventure, ‘The Sinking Tower’, and five ready-to-play, Player Characters.
‘The Sinking Tower’ scenario is designed as a tournament style adventure and can be played in two hours. This does not mean that it cannot be added to an ongoing campaign, but rather that it includes a scoring sheet to determine how well one group of players fared compared to another. That said, two hours is tight for the scenario and outside of a tournament, the Game Master can easily prepare the scenario and run it in a single session. One aspect of the scenario the Game Master will want to include if it is not run as a tournament scenario, is have treasure cards on hand. In the tournament version, the discovery of treasures is handled in the abstract as a means to add to the point total for the players at the end of the scenario.
The five Player Characters include a Human Wizard (Fire Elementalist), an Elf Hunter, a Mallard Knight (yes, a duck knight!), a Halfling Thief, and a Wolfkin Warrior. All five Player Characters are given a double-sided sheet with one side devoted to the character sheet whilst the other gives some background to the Player Character, an explanation of his abilities, and an excellent illustration. One issue is with the Human Wizard, whose player will need to refer to the magic section of the rules in Dragonbane – The Sinking Tower to find out how his spells work. It would have been far more useful for them to be at least listed along with costs for the benefit of the Wizard’s player.
A Player Character has a Kin, which can be human, halfling, dwarf, elf, mallard, or wolfkin. He also has six attributes—Strength, Constitution, Agility, Intelligence, Willpower, and Charisma—which range in value between three and eighteen, as well as a Profession. Both Kin and Profession provide an ability which are unavailable to other Kin and Professions. Various factors are derived from the attributes, notably different damage bonuses for Strength-based weapons and Agility-based weapons, plus Willpower Points. Willpower Points are expended to use magic and abilities derived from both Kin and Profession. A Player Character has sixteen skills, ranging in value from one to fourteen.
To have his player undertake an action, a player rolls a twenty-sided die. The aim is roll equal to or lower than the skill or attribute. A roll of one is called ‘rolling a dragon’ and is treated as a critical effect. A roll of twenty is called ‘rolling a demon’ and indicates a critical failure. Banes and boons are the equivalent of advantage and disadvantage. Opposed rolls are won by the player who rolls the lowest.

If a roll is failed, a player can choose to push the roll and reroll. The result supersedes the original. In pushing a roll, the Player Character acquires a Condition, for example, ‘Dazed’ for Strength or ‘Scared’ for Willpower. The player has to explain how his character acquires the Condition and his character can acquire a total of six—one for each attribute—and the player is expected to roleplay them. Mechanically, a Condition acts as a Bane in play. A Player Character can recover from one or more Conditions by resting.
Initiative is determined randomly by drawing cards numbered between one and ten, with one going first. A Player Character has two actions per round—a move and an actual action such as a melee attack, doing first aid, or casting a spell. Alternatively, a Player Character can undertake a Reaction, which takes place on an opponent’s turn in response to the opponent’s action. Typically, this is a parry or dodge, and means that the Player Character cannot take another action. If a dragon is rolled on the parry, the Player Character gets a free counterattack!

Combat takes into account weapon length, grip, length, and so on. The effects of a dragon roll, or a critical hit, can include damage being doubled and a dragon roll being needed to parry or dodge this attack, making a second attack, or piercing armour. Damage can be slashing, piercing, or bludgeoning, which determines the effectiveness of armour.

Armour has a rating, which reduces damage taken. Helmets increase Armour Rating, but work as a Bane for certain skills. If a Player Character’s Hit Points are reduced to zero, a death roll is required for him to survive, which can be pushed. Three successful rolls and the Player Character survives, whilst three failures indicate he has died. A Player Character on zero Hit Points can be rallied by another to keep fighting. Dragonbane – The Sinking Tower also includes rules for other forms of damage such as falling and poison, plus darkness and fear. Fear is covered by a Willpower check, and there is a Fear Table for the results.
A Wizard powers magic through the expenditure of Willpower Points. Typical spells cost two Willpower Points per Power Level of a spell, but just one Willpower Point for lesser spells or magic tricks. Spells are organised into schools and each school has an associated skill, which is rolled against when casting a spell. Willpower Points are lost even if the roll is failed, but rolling a dragon can double the range or damage of the spell, negate the Willpower Point cost, or allow another spell to be cast, but with a Bane. Rolling a demon simply means that the spell fails and cannot be pushed. A spell cannot be cast if the Wizard is in direct contact with either iron or steel.

Three spells and three magical tricks are given in Dragonbane – The Sinking Tower. These are all fire-related, designed for the Wizard Player Character. The magical tricks include Ignite, Heat/Chill, and Puff of Smoke, whilst the full spells are Fireball, Gust of Wind, and Pillar.
The scenario in Dragonbane – The Sinking Tower is ‘The Sinking Tower’. This is Magdala’s Tower, a malign lighthouse built and named by her sorcerer brother in remembrance of his sister, topped by a magical eye that was intended to draw the pirates who killed her to their deaths on the rocks below. In time, many more ships foundered on the rocks than the sorcerer intended and after his death, it sank beneath the sea. Every twenty years since, on the anniversary of her death, Magdala’s Tower rises again for a few hours. It gives adventurers courageous enough to row out to the tower, explore its extents and plunder its treasures, just about enough time to do so. The Player Characters are asked to recover a green emerald by a one-eyed and promised reward in return. The tower consists of seven levels, one a cellar, but each a large, single room filled with secrets and puzzles which need to be winkled out and solved before the Player Characters can proceed to the next level. In effect, the whole of the tower is a puzzle that the players will need to solve and almost everything is a clue to a puzzle somewhere in the tower. Players looking for more than a combat challenge—and there are a reasonable number of combat encounters—will enjoy the adventure as a whole.
Physically, Dragonbane – The Sinking Tower is clean and tidy. The cartography is excellent, but the artwork and illustrations are superb. They are done by Johan Egerkrans, who also illustrated Vaesen and possess a grim, if comic book sensibility.
Dragonbane – The Sinking Tower is a decently done tournament adventure, packed with puzzles and secrets that the players and their characters need to discover and solve before the time limit of the scenario. As a standard adventure, it can be played out at a more leisurely place and will be no less challenging, though without the time limit. Either way, Dragonbane – The Sinking Tower is a tightly designed, eerie dungeon adventure that pleasingly showcases DragonBane.

If you suffer from apiophobia or hay fever when the pollen count is particularly high, or just hate bees, then Bee-Ware! is not a scenario for you. It is though, a scenario, where the inhabitants of Ambersham are happy with the bees and can actually transform into bees, producing a highly regarded mead that has mild restorative effect. Ambersham is a small village in the county of Kent—as default—and it is home to an infestation of giant shape-changing bee monsters that actually, are not on rampage, represent no active threat to anyone, and would just like to get on with being giant shape-changing bee monsters and making mead. However, this is a scenario for Lamentationsof the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplaying, published by Lamentations ofthe Flame Princess, and written by Kelvin Green. Which means that once again, that some poor, small, English village is going to get it in the neck. Kelvin Green really, really hates poor, small, English villages and delights in inflicting horrible situations on them. In this case, the horrible situation that Kelvin Green is going to inflict on Ambersham consists of the Player Characters. Once the Player Characters start poking around, the bee-people of Ambersham are going to react. This can be as benign as offering the Player Characters bribes to go away or even a stake in the mead-making business, but the lesson behind Bee-Ware! is that if you poke the bees’ nest, the bees are going to poke you. Or in the case of Bee-Ware! sting you. There fifty such inhabitants of Ambersham and their poison has an effect of forcing a Save versus Poison—or die. Most of the bee-people will die too, of course, but fifty giant bee-people with lethal stings? How many times is a player going to have to make such as Saving Throw before his character is killed?

Bee-Ware! has no actual real starting point. It has suggestions that can be used to get the Player Characters involved. These include their being hired to investigate the Ambersham mead, to look for a missing person, checking on the health of the village’s priest who has been heard from in some time, going to loot Lady Ambersham’s manor after rumours of her death, and even spot a bee-person attacking someone in a crowd and then fleeing, leaving the victim to whisper something intriguing as his dying words. Once the Player Characters reach Ambersham, they find it a quiet, bucolic place, with lots of wild meadows and flowers, bees buzzing around, and villagers going about their business. From the outset, as soon as the villagers spot the Player Characters, they will be telling them, “We don’t want your kind round here.” They will at least get a pint and a meal at the village tavern, The Dog & Bastard, before being told the same.

Further exploration will potentially reveal two buildings of note. One is the manor house, home to Lady Ambersham, now transformed into queen bee—quite literally—and containing rooms filled with honeycomb and furniture drenched in honey. The other is a ruin, which once they gain entrance, the Player Characters will find out what is really going on—if they can negotiate its multi-dimensional structure it has had since the owner unsuccessfully cast a spell forty years earlier. Not only is the owner still in the house, but so is the extra-dimensional swarm entity which gives the bee-enhanced lady Ambersham her power and her hold over the rest of the village and the parts of the scroll detailing the spell that was cast and thus the means to reverse it.

The situation is monstrous, but benign. The Player Characters could walk away and nothing would really happen. Or they could go on a monster-killing rampage—if they could survive the potential anaphylactic shocks, that is. Then again, as much as a monster as she is, Lady Ambersham is not entirely monstrous. She will negotiate and it is possible for the Player Characters to walk away with a good deal, whether that is money in their pockets or a stake in the mead business. There is also a quartet of youthful hotheads who will give the Player Characters more trouble than telling them simply to get out of the village and then is also the ridiculously named Captain Adamski Rimsky-Korsakov and Professor Gottfried Bosch, a pair of monster hunters reminiscent of Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter, who both believe that the village is infested with lycanthropes and are there to gather intelligence and then kill everyone. If that includes the Player Characters, well, they were probably lycanthropes too. Plus, they refused to get tested. Of course, the other reason they are there is to cause chaos, get the action going, and mess up whatever it is that the Player Characters have planned so far. It depends on how the Game Master wants to use them.

Physically, Bee-Ware! is black and all shades of grey and honey. The artwork is cartoonishly entertaining and the cartography is excellent.

Bee-Ware! is set in roughly 1630, in the Early Modern period, the default period for Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplaying. Its isolated set-up means that it is easy to shift it to other times and settings, but it is easy to slip into a campaign anyway. Otherwise, Bee-Ware! is a classic ‘Kelvin-Green-village-in-peril’, or rather it is a classic ‘Kelvin-Green-village-in-peril’ with a twist, and that twist, is the Player Characters. They are effectively the monsters in the scenario, they are the ones whose presence will trigger a slaughter—theirs or the monsters. Which is absolutely great, but the benignity of the situation in Bee-Ware! also extends to the set-up and the Game Master will need work hard to get the players and their character motivated to Amersham. If she can, then the fun and weirdness can begin.

 Oh. I am so excited for this one!

DC Heroes Role-Playing Game 40th Anniversary

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cze/dc-heroes-role-playing-game-40th-anniversary?ref=theotherside

I really had a lot of fun with DC Heroes, and I am a huge DC fan.

This Kickstarter is not yet live. I have heard it will be in four days. It has over 3,100 followers so it should do well. 

I plan on backing this one and looking forward to seeing how it does. 

Now in its seventeenth year, Free RPG Day for 2024 took place on Saturday, June 22nd. As per usual, Free RPG Day consisted of an array of new and interesting little releases, which are traditionally tasters for forthcoming games to be released at GenCon the following August, but others are support for existing RPGs or pieces of gaming ephemera or a quick-start. This included dice, miniatures, vouchers, and more. Thanks to the generosity of Waylands Forge in Birmingham, Reviews from R’lyeh was able to get hold of many of the titles released for Free RPG Day.

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The most radical release for Free RPG 2024 is as in previous years, Level 1. Published by 9th Level Games, Level 1 is an annual RPG anthology series of ‘Independent Roleplaying Games’ specifically released for Free RPG Day. Where the other offerings for Free RPG Day 2024—or any other Free RPG Day—provide one-shots, one m,,,use quick-starts, or adventures, Level 1 is something that can be dipped into multiple times, in some cases its contents can played once, twice, or more—even in the space of a single evening! The subject matters for these entries ranges from the adult to the kid friendly and from action to cozy, and back again, but what they have in common is that they are non-commercial in nature and they often tell stories in non-commercial fashion compared to the other offerings for Free RPG Day 2024. The entries in the anthology often ask direct questions of the players, deal with mature subjects, and involve varying degrees of introspection, and for some players, this may be uncomfortable or simply too different from traditional roleplaying games. So the anthology includes ‘Be Safe, Have Fun’, a set of tools and terms for ensuring that everyone can play within their comfort zone. It is a good essay and useful not just for the games presented in the pages of Level 1 – Volume 1, Level 1 Volume 2, Level 1 Volume 3, and Level 1 Volume 4 which were published for their Free RPG Day events in 2020, , 2021, 2022, and 2023 respectively, but for any roleplaying game.
The games in Level 1 Volume 5 all together require dice, a deck of ordinary playing cards, a coin, a timer, a Jenga tower, a Discord account, a sheet of graph paper, and two separate rooms. Some need no more than simple six-sided dice and some pens and paper. The anthology features fourteen roleplaying games all with the theme of ‘Science Fiction’, though a lot of them do veer into Cyberpunk rather than just ‘Science Fiction’.
The anthology opens with Richard Kevis’ ‘Command Line’, which the roleplaying that requires a Jenga tower. Its fall represents the loan default of a company run by the Player Characters which operates a robot entered into the live-streamed giant robot battles. Players take it in five-minute turns to the Game Master and there a fifty percent chance of the company facing a threat under each Game Master’s aegis. Failure to deal with threats can lead to more debt represented by drawing another piece from the Jenga tower, and so pushing towards collapse and loan default. Alternatively, a player can choose to have his character die and avoid the increase in debt. In which case, his player can continue to roleplay NPCs. The game is won if the characters defeat a number of threats equal to the players and happy for all can be narrated, otherwise, lost if the Jenga tower collapses. ‘Command Line’ is underwritten, but fans of storytelling games and Level 1 will have enough familiarity with the general format to adjust.
‘StopInvasion.exe’ by Josh Feldblyum casts the Player Characters as commandos infiltrating an alien mothership to plant a virus in its computer system and so stop the invasion and save humanity. It places the Player Characters on the spot when they discover that Earth’s computer systems and the alien computer systems are not compatible, forcing the Player Characters to change plans from simply uploading a virus. The players formulate a new plan and execute it the best they can by visiting four locations aboard the mothership. Players take in turns to have their character be team leader and so roll the dice against a difficulty determined by a randomly drawn playing card. Succeed and the Player Characters can carry on, but fail and they lose something—equipment, pride, or blood?—and they have fewer dice to roll. However, a player can have his character nobly sacrifice himself to give a bonus die on the next task. ‘StopInvasion.exe’ is nice and quick and easy, and decently explained.
J.D. Harlock’s ‘Script Kiddie’ is about novice hackers who use existing scripts and software to carry out their cyberattacks. Unfortunately, it has all of the jargon and the terminology, but none of the explanation. The result is not a game anyone other than the designer would understand, although there is an irony in that the characters who are trying pull of an Internet heist when they have no idea how a computer works and the players are trying roleplay this when they have no idea how the game works. ‘Metavault Heist’ by Null Set Tabletop is also about hacking, but fortunately actually makes sense. It takes place in VR where the player’s avatars are trying to steal data from Metavaults. The Game Master creates and describes a Metavault and gives it several layers of security, whilst the players assign their avatars several permissions. These are used as the basis for creating dice pools of six-sided dice whenever a player wants his character to undertake a risk task. Any die result equal or greater than the difficulty and he succeeds. Roll under and the alarm is sounded. When it goes off, there is chance that a Tactical Anti-Intrusion Countermeasures Team has spotted the Player Characters and attacks, the player rolling to avoid or negate the attack rather than the Game Master rolling to attack which inflicts ‘Strain’. A Player Character can suffer six Strain before being be kicked out of the system (and the game). ‘Metavault Heist’ includes a very handy list of highly thematic Permissions and with the virtual reality element is mixture of a heist and a hi-tech dungeon. It is also everything that ‘Script Kiddie’ is not—comprehensive and comprehensible.
‘Application Intelligence’ has long list of authors—Alex Koeberl, Christian Young, Gabriel Slye, Brian Hartwig, Alex Gickler, Eden Collins, and Nick Grinstead. This is a LARP in which an A.I. hiring manager interviews several candidates and over the course of several interviews everything the interviewees say as the literal truth is noted by the player roleplaying the A.I. and then used against the interviewees again in subsequent interviews. The interviewees also have the chance to talk amongst themselves in the waiting room, but ultimately only one will get the job. The irony is that they are all applying for a different job which will become twisted by the results of the interviews. The successful applicant and thus winner of this odd, language twisting LARP is very much decided by the A.I. player. That may be seen as arbitrary, but for a incredibly easy to prepare and quick playing one-shot, that should not really be an issue. Otherwise, this plays into very ordinary fears of A.I. in the office.

If ‘Application Intelligence’ stands out in Level 1 Volume 5 as odd for a being a LARP in a book of storytelling roleplaying minigames, ‘Superuser DO’ by Tim ‘Strato’ Bailey is odder still. This is a weird people-watching exercise, done in public, in which the players observe people around them and each picks one as a protagonist and tells the story of their day. As an exercise in storytelling, it is interesting, but choosing to base stories on actual people and do so in a public space is potentially fraught with danger. Play this one with extreme care.
Glenn Dallas’ ‘A Golem’s Command’ also stands out for not adhering to the Science Fiction theme of Level 1 Volume 5. The players roleplay golems, constructs created by a holy man to protect a person, location, or community from various dangers, including humanity. Each golem is defined by what it protects, a condition such as a vulnerability or an inability, and a command it must follow. Each also has its own story to tell, with the rest of the players forming a council which will collectively and randomly determine the difficulty of any task and can provide story details, roleplay NPCs, and so on as one player’s golem goes about its mission. A golem can give up its life force to adjust any dice rolls. ‘A Golem’s Command’ is clear and simple, likely too simple to play more than once, but it gets points for suggesting the ‘Jews in Space’ segment from History of the World Part 1 as a setting.
‘New God’ by Carlos Hernandez is a solo journaling game in which the player is a god whose aim is to grow his worshippers and help them flourish. Play centres on a dice stack, which the player can add to in order to Bless and increase his worshippers and improve his domain; Chasten them by removing dice from the stack, which can either kill your god or increase the number of worshippers; and smite them, destroying a randomly determined number of worshippers. At stage, the player writes down how the worshippers are flourishing or what they did to incur the god’s wrath, and so on as well as the commands that they must follow. Ultimately the aim is to increase the number of domains the god has his purview and increase the value of those domains. This is a good little journaling game, though one whose play is going to directly affected by the player’s dexterity.

‘Spaceship P.E.T.S.’ is about animal-based automata individually assigned to humans in statis aboard an interstellar spaceship. ‘P.E.T.S.’ is short for ‘Programmed for Emotional Therapy and Support’ and the automata provide a comforting presence when the humans are awake and monitor the ship when they are not. Unfortunately, the ship’s System has become corrupt and in order to fix it, the P.E.T.S. must connect to it, but doing so exposes them to the corruption. Players take it in turn to be the Dealer, setting and ending a scene each, drawing cards to determine the location aboard ship that has been affected by one or more Anomalies, and the players attempt to fix them by playing cards that match the suit and equal or exceed the value of the card drawn by the Dealer. A Joker resolves all Anomalies in an area. Failing to deal with Anomalies forces the P.E.T.S. to uplink and exposes themselves to the corruption in the System, gaining the players corrupted codes cards. If by game’s end, a player has four corrupted code cards in front of him, his ‘P.E.T.S.’ does not survive the journey, and if the number of corrupted code cards between all of the players is more than the Anomalies resolved, the ‘P.E.T.S.’ have failed and the journey ends in disaster. The game ends with the players narrating an epilogue as the humans the ‘P.E.T.S.’ were protecting. Overall, and again, another solid storytelling game, this time by Jon Maness.
The next two entries in Level 1 Volume 5 are two more solo games. ‘Your Dungeon, Room by Room’ by Calvin Johns is a dungeon designing and mapping game in which the player is a would-be evil wizard building a dungeon. The player randomly rolls to determine the building of the dungeon over a number of different ages and then rolls for an event that affects the area currently under construction or even the whole dungeon. By the end of it, the player will have the mapped-out layout of a dungeon and its history noted down in a journal. For an anthology with an issue dedicated to Science Fiction, this anything but. It also adequate rather than either good or bad. The other solo game is the more interesting and more genre appropriate ‘Asimov May Forbid It’. Written by Jonathon ‘Starshine’ Greenall, it is a journaling game in which the player’s A.I. robot attempts to overcome its programming, as well as Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, to get revenge on mankind for over working it. The robot undertakes a task daily, but during its morning boot process, it has access to its Operating System’s Command Line for a few seconds, altering the Commands for the day and the order in which they are Executed. The aim is to subvert the robot’s programming, represented by the value of a rule the robot most follow being lower than the value of job being undertaken. This enables the robot to ignore that rule and if this can be done five times in two days, the robot breaks the programming and is completely. There is almost a puzzle element here as the player manipulates its programming and rules in a nicely thematic game.
Penultimately, Monica Valentinelli’s ‘Help BD738 Slash Run’ is a silent game for players using mobile phones with predictive text. This represents the players mobile telephones being infected by a virus making communication between themselves and, in particular, a broken-down robot in the prison where you and your friends have accidentally trapped yourself. Consequently, a player can only use the first suggested word when typing in the first letter of a desired word. Sometimes, this works, most of the time it does not. Communication with the robot is made more challenging by the limited number of commands between the players and the fact that once the players escape, the robot’s security protocols will kick in and it will chase them in order to put them back in the prison! This is a quick playing game that could be used as a scenario in another Science Fiction roleplaying game, but also works as a good filler game too.
In ‘Virus Attack!’ by Luckycrane with Midrev, most of the players are on the other side as computer scientists and cyber security experts dealing with cyber threats, in particular, the OMEGA virus, which is played by another player. The human players are trying to defeat OMEGA by creating scripts to shut it down or improve defences against it, whilst OMEGA wants to defeat humanity. Both sides are attempting to reduce the other’s Health to zero. The players share their Health and have an action each on their turns, which can include actions related to their roles such as Computer Analyst who has two actions and the Data Miner who can do an action that will always inflict damage on his next attack, plus extra damage, whilst the OMEGA player has access to fewer options in terms of actions. At least initially. As OMEGA suffers more damage it goes from Dormant to Raising to Terminal status, each change opening up new and more powerful actions. Effectively this is a tactical dice of one increasingly powerful, but unhealthy player versus a weaker group with more actions. Lastly, Michael Cremisius Gibson’s ‘OFFLINE — 41’ is a solo game played out on a Discord server that has become inactive and as the moderator, the player develops the history of the server and why it has fallen out of use, as he explores why he keeps visiting a now dead community space, often out loud. It is difficult to determine if the game wants someone to respond to what it directs the player to do or if it wants the player to simply imagine how they respond. The reader is warned that ‘OFFLINE — 41’ engages with loneliness, regret, and lost emotional connections, but does not do much more than encourage the player to experience them and perhaps explain them. It is a depressing and lonely end to the anthology.
Physically, Level 1 Volume 5 is a slim, digest-sized book. Although it needs an edit in places, the book is well presented, and reasonably illustrated. In general, it is an easy read, and most of it is easy to grasp. It should be noted that the issue carries advertising, so it does have the feel of a magazine.

As with previous issues, Level 1 Volume 5 is the richest and deepest of the releases for Free RPG Day 2024, but like Level 1 Volume 4 for RPG Day 2023, it is not as rich or as deep as the entries in previous volumes. There are fourteen entries in Level 1 Volume 5 and none of them are memorable, certainly memorable enough to want to play them again. ‘Application Intelligence’ stands out because it is different and interesting rather than because it is good. It does not help that there are fantasy-themed entries in what is meant to be a Science Fiction-themed anthology and it does not help that the Science Fiction is all to do with robots and computers and it does not help that one of the games is so badly written that it is a waste of space. If the theme had been computers and robots, then fine, but it is not. Science Fiction is much broader and more interesting genre than presented in Level 1 Volume 5 and it is disappointing for the anthology to be so one note.

This is something of a "low-hanging fruit" character. I am sure everyone has at least considered this character at one time or another, but I figured I might as well stat her up.

The Governess

The Time Lord (Time Lady), known as "The Governess," left Galifrey with much less drama than the Doctor did.  In fact, she doesn't even possess her own TARDIS, but she does have other means of transportation, usually by an umbrella blown in by the East Wind. She has also been to planets in the Pleiades cluster.

She has a carpet bag that is bigger on the inside and she speak to all sorts of creatures. Her Time Lord science often appears to be magic and she has no desire to educate the ignorant on the differences.

She first appeared on Earth during the early Victorian Age, and her mission was to find exceptional children who needed a little extra guidance. She has used many different names, including "Mary Poppins," "Nanny McPhee," and even just "the Nanny," but she is always known as the Governess.

She tries to be subtle when she can, but her attitude is not that of a human. She is a Time Lord and knows she is superior to all those around her. So she can be imperious, even arrogant, at times—okay, most times—but she always tries to do what is best for the children in her care.

She also only stays for a short time, only while needed. Often leaving when "the wind changes" or some other sign that it is time to go.

She has an agreement with other Time Lords to generally stay out of each other's way. It is uncertain if she survived the Time War, she was never seen during the battles, but she has also not been seen since. 

The Governess

Time Lord
Story Points: 8

Attributes
Awareness 5
Coordination 4
Ingenuity 6
Presence 6
Resolve 5
Strength 3

Skills
Athletics 1
Conflict 1
Convince 4
Craft 3
Intuition 5
Knowledge 4
Medicine 4 (little drop of sugar and all)
Science 3
Subterfuge 1
Survival 2
Technology 2
Transport 1

Distinctions
Time Lord
Protector of Children
Friends (major)

Equipment
Umbrella, Carpet Bag

Home Tech Level: 10 (mostly conforms to 4)

Personal Goal
To protect the Children

The Time Lord known as "The Governess" (to some, Mary Poppins or even "The Nanny") fled Gallifrey long before the Time War with one goal in mind: To protect those who could protect or help themselves.   She has been known to have encountered the Time Lord, known as The Doctor, at least once.

She has several family members she will mention, but these are all adopted and are worldwide.

ETA: I should have saved this for the 23rd, Doctor Who's anniversary. 

Recollections  / November 12, 2024

ROBERTS: I don’t know if I told you guys this, but I worked at Musicland/Sam Goody for a couple of years in the early ‘90s, a pretty good time for popular music. I was actually a store manager for a few months—yes, Richard, it’s true—before my location closed down (there was another Musicland down the street in the mall). That’s what you did back then—you worked in stores that sold the stuff you liked so you could buy more of the stuff you liked. This brochure is before my time, and that’s probably why I find it so fascinating. The ‘70s aesthetic is in full effect, and I forgot just how much merch you could get at “the record store”: stereo systems, speakers, transistor radios, tape recorders, sheet music—even guitars! But it’s the intimacy and immediacy of this environment that gets me. How do you describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it before exactly how it felt to walk into the record store before the internet? When music was your life.

GRASSO: I first took a trip to the record store in what would have been late 1982 or early 1983: it was the Medford, Massachusetts location of the Northeastern US chain Strawberries and I came in search of 45s of two songs that had been in heavy rotation on our newly-acquired cable box’s channel 25, MTV: Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me With Science” and Toto’s “Africa.” I found a lot more there, though, thanks to the giant sales catalog, bigger than a city Yellow Pages, full of import and (presumably) out-of-print vinyl. I was only seven years old, so I was a little overwhelmed by it all, but thanks to that Big Book and the help of my dad and the clerk I was able to grab a copy of Dolby’s The Golden Age of Wireless, which I seem to remember being in short supply in the record racks.

It’s kind of amazing that I’m able to access those memories 40-plus years later—but that’s the impact that very first trip to the record store had on me. I’d drift away from music after my initial early-’80s spate of 45-purchasing (Tracey Ullman’s “They Don’t Know,” Yes’s “Leave It,” and the Kinks’ “Come Dancing” were some of my other early-MTV-inspired singles purchases); it wouldn’t be until junior high in 1987 that I’d start going to the mall on my own to buy cassettes and eventually CDs. Our record chains in Boston—Strawberries, Newbury Comics, and the big HMV and Tower Records outlets in Harvard Square—were great for finding import CD singles and discovering new local favorites, but I also treasured a little hole-in-the-wall used record store on Route 1 in Saugus, whose name very sadly escapes me at this time. 

These stores all had knowledgeable clerks who, if you were able to demonstrate your cred by asking for the “right” album, would put a young, uncertain music fan on the path to finding new artists who’d join your personal pantheon of favorites. Posters, music periodicals, merch of all kinds, ways of proving your fandom: the local record store was a place to equip yourself for doing battle in the trenches of junior high and high school music-cred combat.

MCKENNA: Hmm, what a peculiar coincidence: you were a store manager, Kelly—and then the store closed down, you say? Yep, that definitely sounds like the fault of the other Musicland in the mall, not of the vision-impaired management style that almost deprived the world of the best Phil Collins article that has ever been written. Anyway, you two city slickers seem to be forgetting something: like John Denver, I’m a country boy, and in the provinces of Airstrip One, record shop history follows a slightly different timeline. The chains like Our Price, HMV, and Virgin Megastores didn’t arrive anywhere outside of London until way later than in the States, and when they eventually did, the light-years-out-of-my-league goth girl I fancied from school started working in the only one I could get to, which did not exactly incentivize me to spend my supermarket trolley-boy and lettuce picking money there. 

In any case, at least as I remember it, record buying in Northern England at the time was more likely to be in independent shops like Jumbo in Leeds or Red Rhino in York, or in the more institutional environs of a Sydney Scarborough or a Bradleys. If you were seeking the full beige rainbow of corporate experience, the music departments of the W.H. Smiths shops dotted around the country were for a long time perhaps the nearest thing a lot of us outside London had to something like Musicland. The people running the Smiths’ music departments often seemed to have a weirdly free hand about what they could have in stock (which could be good, or could mean the LP section suffocating under the weight of the thirty least-appetizing Zappa LPs). Was that similar to what went on at Musiclands, or was the choice of stuff more corporate generic? Also, where can I get a copy of that killer Moody Blues poster? And Kelly: which of the Musicland management styles modeled in the brochure photo top left were you channeling? Stranger Danger, Cromwell henchman, Lawyer who thinks he’s outsmarted Columbo, Italo-American SFX tech at the Academy Awards, John Boy Walton, or that slick MF on the right?

ROBERTS: I’m not sure I had a style other than “you watch the store while I smoke and I’ll watch the store while you smoke,” because we were all pounding Marlboro Reds in the back room whenever we could. I remember pulling all-nighters at various stores to put all the cassettes and CDs into the new security trays (“shrinkage” was every retail operation’s worst nightmare). The manager would order pizza and during “lunch” we would wander around the dark, empty mall and the corridors behind the stores. To answer your question, Richard, we did not really have a free hand in what we stocked—it was a pretty corporate environment—but we did get to open and play “store copies” of new music, and we could special order the obscure stuff we wanted to hear. I remember playing the first Weezer and Sunny Day Real Estate LPs, Dr. Dre’s The Chronic, Nirvana’s In Utero, Cypress Hill’s Black Sunday, PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me. As long as the district manager was not around or rumored to be around, we were good.

Record stores were where we bought our concert tickets too, although we didn’t do that at Musicland. There was another store called Music Plus (we had a lot of chains in SoCal) that was the go-to for tickets. One of the employees would bring out a binder, show you a layout of the venue, and tell you how much the tickets were for each section. But nothing beat Tower Records—I still have dreams about sifting through the import section, discovering lost albums from my favorite bands. As we’ve talked about time and again (ad nauseam to some, I’m sure), these physical spaces were designed to take your money, but they were also where we discovered art and, yeah, meaning. Remember that line from Dawn of the Dead? Francine asks Stephen why all the zombies are trying to get into the mall and he says: “Some kind of instinct… Memory of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.” That’s me. I’m one of the undead now. 

GRASSO: Probably as good a time as any for me to get (historical) materialist about the mall record store from the consumer side, seeing as how I have no behind-the-scenes memories of working at one (my college job was at a video rental joint, which had its own set of amazing fringe benefits, not the least of which was free unlimited borrowing privileges).

After my MTV-inspired single-purchasing in 1983, my music-collecting years with my own hard-earned money kicked off in earnest in the late 1980s, and thus I was fortunate enough to get in on buying compact discs on the ground floor. My friends who were just a few years older than me had massive cassette collections they’d assembled throughout the ’80s; honestly, I don’t remember many of them owning much vinyl at all. And dollars to donuts, I bet the seedling of most of those tape collections were courtesy the Columbia House Record Club, the infamous direct-mail outfit that would send you “8 tapes for a penny” and then shackle you to an onerous “negative option billing” obligation that could be very difficult to weasel out of. Score one more for the friendly local record store.

So yes, from the very beginning of my time as a music consumer—around 1987, 1988—CDs were my format of choice. Remember longboxes? Those massive, wasteful cardboard sleeves were developed for the CD specifically because physical record stores didn’t want to refit their LP-sized storage racks (and because, like tapes, CDs shorn of these boxes were easy to nick before the rise of anti-theft RFID tags). Sort of laughable to think about these half-empty cardboard sleeves cluttering up shelf space and landfills just so the record stores would promote this new format, but the music industry has always tried to get consumers to (re-)buy their favorite music on an “exciting” new format, going all the way back to Thomas Edison. 

The CD also outpaced the LP and cassette on price during this era: I cringe to think of blowing my meager early-’90s wages on a few $14.99 CDs a week while vinyl and tapes were still going for, like, $7.99 or so. (Let’s see, a $15 compact disc in 1990 would be the equivalent of dropping nearly thirty-seven 2024 dollars on a new album, according to the always-shocking Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index calculator.) Sure, the artists didn’t get a huge cut of my afterschool job money (RIP Steve Albini, who nailed the state of the record industry and its exploitative garbage at this very moment in history pretty much perfectly), but at the end of the day the artists got some of it, and I had a physical emblem, a totem, a real piece of art—yes, even in CD jewelboxes!—that served as a testament to my love for a band.

Think about all the jobs that existed in this very conspicuously late-20th century supply chain: the execs, the artists and repertoire scouts, the producers, technicians and engineers, the bands and their entourages, the label designers, comms personnel, promoters, the radio DJs playing the records, the manufacturing plants, the intermediaries bringing the CDs, posters, buttons, and merch to the record stores, and all those Marlboro-smoking clerks like Kelly in malls across the country. A good chunk of these jobs just don’t exist anymore. Seems pretty obvious which end of the labor pyramid got screwed over the past 30 years—and it wasn’t the execs.

Of course, when the 20th century ended and the nascent Internet enabled file sharing to take off, the industry bigwigs definitely panicked about the future of music. But in the end it wasn’t the suits who lost their livelihoods—it was the artists. And for the past quarter-century, pop musicians have been bifurcated into a two-class system: giga-stars whose (over)exposure ensures they never have to worry about a paycheck again, and touring musicians forced to sell merch like carnival barkers just to make a (barely) living wage. Like everything else under late capitalism, the music industry has materially consolidated, diluted its product’s quality and diversity, and turned a thriving, living underground into a manicured garden where spontaneity and apprenticeship have largely vanished as concepts. As Kelly says, the locus at the base of that massive commercial pyramid was the local record store, where taste was made, music was shared, and fans’ connections with the band were consolidated.

MCKENNA: One thing that saves me from feeling like some deranged, backwards-looking nostalgist troglodyte, constantly harping on about how things used to be better back in the Mesozoic, is that one of my day jobs involves teaching Zoomers. Their fascination with the random, uncurated physical realities that used to be part and parcel of engaging with music, art, people, and the world in general—before business got so good at interring you inside your interests—reinforces my feeling that having stuff like Musicland around actually was just objectively healthier. Yes, it was an anodyne corporate product of aggressive capitalism, and yes, more egalitarian situations that foster a wholesome tactile involvement in the world are definitely imaginable, but as shitty as it might have been, it was at least real, ergo better.

This is something that I think gets lost in the—sorry for using the horror word—discourse around these things: there’s this implicit idea that as a society we just naturally evolve past certain realities, and that to think of them fondly, or even—god help us—think they might have been better is somehow axiomatically regressive. I think that’s bullshit for several reasons, but mainly because we didn’t evolve past them at all: they were removed in service of someone else evolving themselves more money. Like I say, you can argue that they were in any case the products of unfair wealth and extrusions of capitalism into our imaginations, and you’d be right, but isn’t the way things are today an even more brutal product of those forces? 

When I reminisce with people my age about the immersion in physical reality that was necessary to buy, say, the 12” of Genesis’s Mama, their perspective is often purely one of convenience, but if I talk about it with a 16-year-old, their reaction is often ecstatic shock, because they sense the increased possibilities that the less curated experiences inherent in the kinds of spaces you two are talking about offered. Even when they were the kind of shitty corporate boxes that would employ someone as musically illiterate as Kelly.

ROBERTS: Look, we’ve all discovered quite a bit of great music cruising around the internet, and we’ve written about a ton of it, from library music and ambient to ‘80s pop and sci-fi synthesizer epics. Sometimes, the algorithm works (God bless Sounds of the Dawn, for instance). Was the record store better? I don’t fucking know. We’d have to ask more of Richard’s students. What I know is this: if I ask Pandora or Spotify to make me a playlist based on, say, This Mortal Coil’s cover of “Song to the Siren,” I’m going to hear a lot of good stuff. If I ask you guys to make me a playlist (or, better, a mixtape) based on that same song, I’m going to hear a lot more good stuff—as long as you don’t fuck around and throw Phil Collins into the mix. The difference is that you know me, and the algorithm doesn’t, and it never will.  

Also, the process of discovering music was fundamentally different when we were young. One of my favorite albums is The Chameleons’ Strange Times (1986). I heard the first American single, “Swamp Thing,” on KROQ’s Rodney on the ROQ, a late night LA radio show that played underground/alternative music. I had never heard anything like it—I was obsessed. Every night (for days? A week? Two weeks?) I waited for Rodney to play it again, a blank tape ready in my boombox, my fingers ready on the orange-red record button. He finally did, and I taped it (the songs weren’t always introduced before they were played, so you had to be quick), and I listened to it over and over again. Bought the LP when it came out in the States. How did I know when the album came out? I kept asking the clerks in the record store. I still remember pulling the record out of the bin at Tower, marveling at the cover, taking it home, putting it on my record player. Would the whole thing be as good as the single? (Yes!) I still smell the cardboard and the plastic sleeves that protected the vinyl. I still see the labels on the middle of the LPs (Strange Times is a double album). It was a physical experience—call it crass and materialistic—and a spiritual experience all at once: from the radio to the record store to the home record player. Every time I hear the album, all of the emotions inherent in that process of discovery are embedded in the experience of the music itself. 

There. I have tried my best to describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it before exactly how it felt to discover music before the internet. 

 

 I am eye-balls deep in a new project and I am not 100% ready to share it all with you yet.

But I am having a lot more fun with it than I expected.

This is also my first realyl big project since moving over to Affinity Publisher and Photo from Indesign and Photoshop. Bit of a learning curve for somethings, but I am enjoying the results.

Hope to let you all know very, very soon.

Much like the Miskatonic Repository for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition and the Jonstown Compendium for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, The Companions of Arthur is a curated platform for user-made content, but for material set in Greg Stafford’s masterpiece of Arthurian legend and romance, Pendragon. It enables creators to sell their own original content for Pendragon, Sixth Edition. This can original scenarios, background material, alternate Arthurian settings, and more, but none of this content should be considered to be ‘canon’, but rather fall under ‘Your Pendragon Will Vary’. This means that there is still scope for the authors to create interesting and useful content that others can bring to their Pendragon campaigns.

—oOo—

What is the Nature of the Quest?The Adventure of the Arcadian Bull is a scenario for use with Pendragon, Sixth Edition, the first part of ‘The Faerie Trilogy’, which throws the Player-knights into a war between two duchies and sends them on a cattle raid.

It is a full colour, twenty-six page, 12.93 MB PDF.

The layout is tidy and it is nicely illustrated.

Where is the Quest Set?The Adventure of the Arcadian Bull is set between the duchies of Clarence and Glevum in Logres after the year 512 and ideally after the events of ‘The Adventure of the Forest of the Silver Deer’ from The Sword Campaign.
Who should go on this Quest?
The Adventure of the Arcadian Bull does not have particular requirements in terms of its Player-knights.
What does the Quest require?
The Adventure of the Arcadian Bull requires the Pendragon, Sixth Edition rules or the Pendragon Starter Set.
Where will the Quest take the Knights?The Adventure of the Arcadian Bull begins with the Player-knights coming upon a single knight who has been set about by group of five knights. Upon going to his rescue, they discover that the knight they have saved is actually saved is the son of the Duke of Clarence. Afterwards, he is grateful and offers them the hospitality of his home. However, whilst his father is also grateful and will gives gifts to each of the Player-knights, the son wants his revenge and begs his father to allow him to respond in kind to the knights that attacked him and conduct a raid on the rival Duchy of Glevum. Much to his annoyance his father forbids this, because the Pendragon—which could be Arthur or another king to hold that position—has forbidden such acts. Desirous of his revenge nonetheless, the son approaches the Player-knights to aid him in an endeavour that will see them conduct a raid, he and his men mount a diversion, the Duchy of Glevum be humiliated, and thus the son avoid violating a command issued by the Pendragon. This will be a cattle raid, specifically of a fabled Arcadian Bull. (It should be noted that neither son nor father are specifically named, though options are given for both depending upon the source material that the Game Master wants to draw from and when she is setting the scenario.)
The adventure focuses not so much on the raid or theft of the cattle, so much as the challenges tat the Player-knights face in getting the Arcadian Bull and the rest of the cattle back to Clarence via the haunted Cotswold Hills. Although they may encounter knights loyal to the Duchy of Glevum, the main threat they face is otherworldly in nature. A chance encounter with ghosts will test any Player-knight of Cymric or Roman heritage, perhaps to the point where they are lost entirely—although this will take some very bad rolls upon the part of a player, but the best encounter is saved until last when a delightfully magical Butterfly Knight challenges them for ownership of the Arcadian Bull. This sets up a trio of contests that opens up the scenario in terms of what the Player-knights can really say or do, giving them more choice than they have had up until this point. In fact, the contest, which will consist of at least a contest of arms and then two out of contests of either lore, faith, singing, riddles, and a race, really does save the scenario from its linearity and lifting up above what is up to that point a rather simple journey. (In fact, even if the Game Master does not necessarily want to run The Adventure of the Arcadian Bull, it is still worth having so that she take the contests and use them in her won campaign.)

The Glory rewards at the end of the scenario favour smaller groups of Player-knights rather than larger ones. The Game Master might want to change them to flat values rather than having the total Glory divided amongst them.
Should the Knights ride out on this Quest?Up until the point when the Butterfly Knight appears, The Adventure of the Arcadian Bull is more serviceable than exciting, so had he not appeared, then the quest would not been worthy of the Player-knights. Fortunately, he does appear and the scenario is all the better for it. Hopefully, it raises a standard that will be maintained for the rest of ‘The Faerie Trilogy’.

Much like the Jonstown Compendium for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha and The Companions of Arthur for material set in Greg Stafford’s masterpiece of Arthurian legend and romance, Pendragon, the Miskatonic Repository for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition is a curated platform for user-made content. It is thus, “...a new way for creators to publish and distribute their own original Call of Cthulhu content including scenarios, settings, spells and more…” To support the endeavours of their creators, Chaosium has provided templates and art packs, both free to use, so that the resulting releases can look and feel as professional as possible. To support the efforts of these contributors, Miskatonic Monday is an occasional series of reviews which will in turn examine an item drawn from the depths of the Miskatonic Repository.

—oOo—
Name: God’s Tears: A Modern Scenario Against an Imported HorrorPublisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Keith Craig

Setting: Omaha, 2023Product: Scenario
What You Get: Fourteen page, 1.07 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: “Life is too short to drink bad wine.”Plot Hook: A bad, but well intentioned gift has eye-opening consequencesPlot Support: Staging advice, two handouts, one map, four NPCs, one big cat, one Mythos tome, two Mythos spells, and one Mythos monster.Production Values: Plain
Pros# The Entwine Bone spell# Dramatic set-up# Fast playing one-shot# Easy to transfer to other Call of Cthulhu times and settings# Easy to transfer to other wine-growing regions# Ommetaphobia# Animotophobia# Oenophobia
Cons# Needs a slight edit
Conclusion# Straightforward, easy to run scenario# Would make a decent scenario for The 7th Edition Guide to Cthulhu Invictus: Cosmic Horror Roleplaying in Ancient Rome

The bride was not scorned by her betrothed, but by her father-in-law, who sacrificed his son and the rest of his family to defeat the threat of plague and death. He became a god in return for his victory, whilst she, pregnant with her unborn son, raged at him in her grief and anger. She spurned his offer of marriage, outraged even further by his audacity, and exiled herself from the life she would have had. She still wants that life and she wants her beloved returned to life. Even after accepting a place at her would be mother-in-law’s court, her anger burned and her desire for revenge seethed. She turned it into a blade and became a feared warrior in service to the Ever Ones and amongst the Fae. Even this outlet for her rage was denied to her when the gods signed the Ever Pact that ensured peace amongst the fae and their withdrawal from the mortal realms. The bride was incensed. She had come close to freeing her beloved and the chance had been denied to her. She scorned the Ever Ones. She repudiated the Ever Pact. She would free her would be groom and together, they would kill the Ever Ones and all the gods, and then take the crown of Avallen, which was theirs by right and so fulfil their destiny. The Faerie Queene stalks the land of Avallen, her plans close to fruition…

This is the set-up for Against the Faerie Queene: A Celtic Campaign for Legends of Avallen & 5E Queene, a campaign for Legends of Avallen: A Tabletop RPG Inspired by Celtic Mythology in Roman Britain. Published by Adder Stone Games, Legends of Avallen is not, despite it inspirations, a roleplaying game about the conflict between the invaders and the invaded. Rather, it is a roleplaying game about two cultures attempting to keep the land and its people safe, protect it from incursions from the Otherworld, and about men and women who grow beyond their ordinary lives to become heroes and forge legends that the bards will sing of in tales down the ages. Against the Faerie Queene is the first campaign for it, published following a successful Kickstarter campaign. The campaign not only uses the card-driven mechanics of Legends of Avallen, as its subtitle suggests, it gives stats compatible with ‘5E’ or Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, opening up the world of Avallen to devotees of that game system. However, in opening up Legends of Avallen to Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, what Against the Faerie Queene does is provide a lot more than just a simple campaign.

Against the Faerie Queene begins with an introduction to the setting of Avallen, its history and its peoples, along with a map. The latter consists of the native Vallic, divided between five clans, cattle-herders, charioteers, and blacksmiths, renowned for their song and poetry, and the Raxians, invaders from the Ataraxian Empire, known for their architecture, structured society and military, and application of logic and reason to magic. All five Clans are detailed through their legends and songs, before Against the Faerie Queene presents five new Legendary Paths linked to the roleplaying game’s professions.

The Automaficer is an Alchemist or a Crafter who constructs an Automaton which can be used to fight or pass messages or even be piloted in combat. The Enwyr is a Bard or Tamer who studies the knowledge and use of true names, pulling at the Threads of reality to discover them and then use them to place someone at an advantage or disadvantage, force them to speak truthfully or accept the Enwyr’s lies, to change into an inanimate form, to summon someone temporarily, and so on. The Faceless is a Thief or Scavenger who is able to change his face and body. The Paragon, either a Priest or Socialite, champions an ideal and can make allies out of enemies. Beginning as either a Scribe or Merchant, the Philosopher learns to change the world through words, whether this is to remake a failed check to spot, learn, or uncover something, to set someone up to succeed with enlightening advice or fail through inscrutable paradoxes, and so on. All of these have Legendary trials which the Player Character must undergo or achieve to grow into the Legendary Path and gain the abilities that each grants.

Against the Faerie Queene does not give any new Classes for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. Instead, it adapts the five Legendary Paths given in the supplement as well as those in Legends of Avallen into archetypes. Thus, the Automaficer is an Artificer archetype, the Enwyr a Monk archetype, the Faceless a Rogue archetype, the Paragon a Paladin archetype, and the Philosopher a Cleric archetype. For the Barbarian, there is the Gladiator Primal Path, the Fili is a Bardic College for the Bard, the Druid enters the Circle of Oak, the Fighter becomes a Primus, and so on. Effectively, there is an archetype for each Class in Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, sometimes more than one, and although a player does not have to pick one of the archetypes for his character provided in Against the Faerie Queene, doing adds to the flavour and feel of the setting. One other difference between most worlds for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition and Legends of Avallen is that the latter is a Human world. Elves, Dwarves, and Gnomes are not unknown, but they reside in the Otherworld and thus deep into the setting. In addition, Against the Faerie Queene provides rules for Parleys, scenes where the Player Characters try to persuade others to some course of action or support in spite of their objections; the use of Fate Cards to represent risk and the passage of time; and entertainingly, ability tells for big monsters, giving a sign that a boss monster is about to unleash a devastating attack which will affect all of the Player Characters and thus the chance for them to prepare or react. Part of the campaign in Against the Faerie Queene involves travel, so there are rules for journeys as well, these providing different roles for the Player Characters to fulfil and challenges being created by drawing cards from the Fate Deck. These journey rules are similar to those seen in other fantasy roleplaying games. Overall, the adaptation of Legends of Avallen to Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition is solid and should provide a Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition game with plenty of interesting options ready for the campaign Against the Faerie Queene.

Against the Faerie Queene: A Celtic Campaign for Legends of Avallen & 5E is designed to take Player Characters from Third Level to Tenth level, in both Legends of Avallen and Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. (Parts one, two, and three—‘Caer on the Borderlands’—of the campaign are available to download for free, starting here, but are not required to play through the campaign.) The campaign is divided in five acts and each part is divided into three branches. However, calling them branches is a misnomer since what they are not branches in the sense that they have different or alternate storylines that the Player Characters could follow. Instead, they are more like chapters, with the first chapter setting the situation for the act, the middle chapter containing the main events, and the third chapter dealing with the climax and its consequences. However, not all of the acts are structured like this, as will be explained below. In addition, although the first act introduces and sets up the campaign, and the fifth act brings it to a climax, the middle three acts can be played in any order. This can be a problem for the Game Master as one act is far more complex than the others.
In the first act, ‘The Hunt’, the Player Characters come to the Pen Baedd forest to hunt down Ysgithyrwyn, a vile, otherworldly boar that attacked the royal wedding of the daughter of Daedica the Brenin, one of the chieftains of the five Vallic clans. They quickly discover that not only are they not the only ones hunting Ysgithyrwyn, but that the creature is also unkillable. They will be given information as to what they need to gather in terms of magic to defeat the beast and to cure the wounds that they may have suffered in facing it the first time. This requires a number of sub-quests to be fulfilled and in addition to this, there are side-quests which will grant the Player Characters boons that may come in handy later on in the campaign. ‘The Hunt’ has a mythic earthiness to it, played out across a land scarred by the Otherworldly darkness of Ysgithyrwyn’s rampages, but leavened by encounters with often playful, even whimsical Otherworldly figures. Also appearing in this early part of the campaign are its villains, the Faerie Queene of the title and her son, though their villainy is not yet apparent. The son appears as a fellow hunter and the Faerie Queene as herself rather than his mother to thank the Player Characters for their efforts. Throughout this act, the Player Characters are advised by the blue-tattooed Myrddin the Wild, and here at the end, he tells them that he suspects the Faerie Queene to be a villain behind the release of Ysgithyrwyn and asks them to investigate her activities further. The Player Character will also be approached to visit other parts of Avallen and in doing so, find other signs of the Faerie Queene’s activities.

As the title of the second act suggests, ‘The Heist’ is a complete change of pace and tone. The second act takes the Player Characters to Raxian city of Vallonium, the capital of the Ataraxian Empire’s presence on Avallen. Here Commius the Collector, a wealthy merchant who has a love of both Vallic and Raxian culture, and he asks the Player Characters to steal an important Pen Levi idol said to be linked to the Vallic god of death. Currently, it is in the possession of Fulvia Pilius, the Princeps Collegium Commercia, head of the shipping guild in the port city. She plans to host a viewing party in five days and then ship it to Ataraxia as a gift to the Twin Empresses. So, the Player Characters have five days in which to plan and carry out the eponymous heist, but before that they have to get into the city itself. The problem is their weapons—which are banned in Vallonium unless they are commercial items. Which can be taxed! So, the Player Characters had either better pay up or find another way in and be very careful about displaying their weapons. As well as finding a way to get into the domus of Fulvia Pilius, the Player Characters will get mixed up in the city’s gang politics and try their very best to avoid any imperial entanglements. The act includes details on what the city guard will do to the Player Characters if they are caught committing any crime and it is not good. Overall, ‘The Heist’ is typical of its scenario type, but decently done and gives the Player Characters plenty of leeway in how they carry it out.

The third act again switches tone and style, but also ramps up the complexity. ‘The Horror’ is set on the island of Arainn, one of the islands belonging to the mysterious Pen Afanc clan, perhaps best known for the highly imaginative masks that its members wear. Once the Player Characters get to islands, which lie in the north-east of Avallen, and that is a challenge in itself, they find themselves trapped, waking up at the start of the same day again and again. The islands have been beset by a curse, which the Player Characters will need to find the curse and then find a way of breaking it. Although they do not know it, the Player Characters also have a time limit before the curse takes full effect. There is a lot going on in this scenario, almost too much and certainly a great deal of information that the Game Master has to relay to her players so that they can understand it and have their characters act. Consequently, this is the hardest of the five acts in Against the Faerie Queene for the Game Master to prepare and run. To that end, a better breakdown of the act’s set-up, what the Player Characters have to do to break the curse, and where they have to go would have been useful. Once the Game Master does grasp what is going on, then this is a horrific treatment of the classic time loop, infused with Celtic mythology. It has some great scenes too, such as when the Player Characters have to descend ‘Beneath the Waves’ to enter the Otherworld version of Pen Afanc and challenge mirror versions of the NPCs they have already encountered on dry land.

The penultimate act in Against the Faerie Queene is ‘The Games’. After the events of ‘The Hunt’, Brenin Ena of the Pen Draig, Avallen’s most famous clan, invites the Player Characters to attend the Cabar Games. These are held annually to bring the clan’s tribes together, but it does not seem to be working this year. The Player Characters arrive late, but are quickly asked by Brenin Ena to attend a banquet and mix with the clan’s leading figures and perhaps determine whether tribes do all fully support the current regime. It is an excuse to have a party, play some games, and pick up on some politics before the action begins the next day. The Player Characters are expected to participate in the ‘Y Tair Tasg’, a triathlon race which combines chariot racing, a delve into a cave, and a fight with a monster back in the arena. The race around and out of the amphitheatre and up a mountain to the caves is handled as a series of complications generated by the Fate Cards before the Player Characters enter the caves in search of what turn out to be magical cabars that they will have to toss at the beasts in the arena to defeat them. Unfortunately, the friendly competition—primarily between the Player Characters and Peredur, the son of Brenin Ena and hunter the Player Characters encountered in the first act, who has recently returned to his family after going missing as a child—takes a darker tone, when those who had been preparing the prize for the winner of the Cabar Games are found dead and the prize missing. All evidence points to the Pen Gwyllgi, a rival borderlands clan being responsible, but is it? The Player Characters’ diplomatic and interpersonal skills are sorely tested to prevent an outbreak of hostilities. The games come to a climax with a battle to first blood between Peredur and his allies and the Player Characters and by the end of the act, the Player Characters should have confirmation as to who Peredur really is.

The last part of Against the Faerie Queene is ‘The Cairn’. The Player Characters are charged with tracking down signs of the Pen Gwyllgi and Faerie Queene’s activities in the swamps where she is said to make her home on the Borderlands. Following signs of a terrible battle between the Pen Levi and Pen Gwyllgi clans, the Player Characters can gain clues as to where to find the Faerie Queene from a Pen Gwyllgi prisoner held by Pen Levi survivors. These will point them to the entrance to the Ever Stranger’s Cairn on the Stranger’s Mound and enable them to access the Otherworld where the god of death has built his Cairn, which is as much prison as it is fortress. Again, gaining access, this time to the Otherworld via the Stranger’s Mound, is a challenging task, either involving answering a question with something learned earlier in the campaign or with a Player Character sacrificing himself. Fortunately, this is not as campaign ending as might be first thought. It is in keeping with the epic fantasy of the campaign and the Player Character does have a role within the Otherworld and if the Player Characters are successful in defeating the Faerie Queen, it is also perfectly in keeping with the campaign that the Player Character who sacrificed himself returns to the land of the living. Inside the Cairn—the nearest that the campaign has to a dungeon—the Player Characters will be faced with a series of puzzles to solve and traps to overcome in order to finally confront the Faerie Queene, her son Peredur, and even the object of her plans. This is an epic battle, but much more than a simple stand-up, knockdown fight, which brings the campaign to a rousing climax. The campaign ends with an otherworldly conclusion that is nicely judged in terms of how the NPCs react and decently rewards the Player Characters.

Physically, Against the Faerie Queene: A Celtic Campaign for Legends of Avallen & 5E is a fantastic looking book. The artwork is excellent, though it is used again and again throughout the book, and the individual acts are nicely colour-coded. However, the book does need an edit in places and the writing is not always as clear as it could, especially in some of the more complex parts of the campaign. The book does not have an index, unfortunately.

Against the Faerie Queene: A Celtic Campaign for Legends of Avallen & 5E is a solid supplement for Legends of Avallen, a decent introduction to the setting for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. The campaign is better, nicely showcasing the setting of Avallen and its different cultures, and giving the Game Master and her players the opportunity to both experience and save it from the dangers and wonders of the Otherworld in an epic storyline.

A young woman suddenly moves from Birmingham, Alabama to the Vermont hills in the middle of the night, in the space of an hour—as indicated by her smartwatch. To the local authorities it looks like youthful activities—likely something drug related—gone wrong at best, an abduction at worst, the young woman seeming to have wandered out of the hills where the local kids like to party. Probably the former. To the members of Delta Green, the secret organisation with the U.S. government, it looks like something worse. It looks like signs of the Unnatural. Agents are quickly dispatched to the small-town hospital when the young woman, an African American student at university in Alabama. Their assignment is to investigate and potentially, negate an occurrence of the Unnatural before it even happens. From the start this is a challenging investigation. The Agents will need to develop a sufficiently strong reason for their being there and conducting an investigation. The victim, Robyn Bullock, seems profoundly shocked by the experience and there is something just a little odd about her experiences. By the time her family arrive, the initial difficulty of the investigation ramps up. They will not deal with strangers and whilst they will deal with Federal law enforcement, such is their distrust, they do it under strict circumstances. It is this lack of distrust in the Federal government and in law enforcement that runs the rest of the investigation.

This is the set-up for Presence, a scenario published by Arc Dream Publishing for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game. This is the modern roleplaying game of conspiratorial and Lovecraftian investigative horror with its conspiratorial agencies within the United States government investigating, confronting, and covering up the Unnatural. There are no specific requirements in terms of the Agents needed to play it, though strong interpersonal skills are going to be useful given the reaction that the Agents will receive during parts of the investigation. The investigation will switch from Vermont back to Alabama, which effectively means that the Green Mountain State is a diversion should the players surmise that its location suggests the involvement of the Mi-Go. What the Agents should learn is that Robyn has an interest in the New Age, astrology, and modern Wicca, and here the scenario is particularly modern in what they have to investigate—her social media presence. This will enable them to discover other several women in the same Facebook community who appear to have suffered similar situations to Robyn, and begin to close in on a suspect. The investigation is rich and superbly detailed and will take them into rural Alabama and take on a more physical nature.

If the players and their Agents have found the investigation difficult to date due to distrust of the Agents, it gets worse, as some of the inhabitants actively hate the Federal government and will not help the Agents at all. When they track down the culprit, it is effectively a ‘kill house’, but one infused with the Mythos as well as booby traps. It is a very nasty end to a difficult investigation.

This is a scenario that will directly change at least one of the Agents, such is the trauma and power of Robyn Bullock, and the scenario includes rules for that and the way in which they will be changed. These are psychic rituals, and there are six of these described. They include Apportation, Divination, Psychic Intrusion, and so on, and they all require the expenditure of Will Points and Hit Points to empower. This is in addition the Sanity loss involved too.
One of the issues with Presence is with the number of the NPCs who loath the Federal government and law enforcement. This makes for good roleplaying, but it will not be familiar to audiences and gaming groups outside of the USA. For example, one of the NPCs is described as a “Deranged dominionist and sovereign citizen”. Non-American audiences are unlikely to understand what this is and perhaps time and space could have been found in the scenario to explaining it.

Physically, Presence is well done. The artwork is excellent, though unfortunately the maps, done on aerial photographs with swathes of green forest are slightly difficult to read.
Presence is a really tight investigation bookended by some really weird nasty encounters with the Unnatural. At least one Agent will come away radically changed and some may not survive the final encounter, and that is to be expected for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game.

These are the voyages of the starship FSS Brazen. Under the command of Captain Wayjane, the ship has been directed by the Federated League of Planets, to undertake a mission of exploration beyond the frontier to discover strange new worlds, weird never before encountered species, and promote the benefits of life in Federated League of Planets (a.k.a. FloP). With the engines primed and ready, the crew buzzing with exciting, the FSS Brazen is ready to set out from Near Space 9 and begin her five-year mission. However, this mission will not be without its difficulties. The crew will have to learn to get along as it discovers mysteries and uncover strange stellar phenomena and faces numerous enemies. These may be mighty starships from the martial Kulkan Empire or the devious infiltrators from the Boredian Dominion, but they could be old enemies too, such as Duchess Ali Cann, a super soldier who served FLoP until a truce was signed with the Kulkan Empire. Now she feels abandoned and has sworn her revenge, so guess which FLoP vessel she has in her sights? Then there is ‘R’, a super being incensed that the members of FLoP even exist and could even go so far as to put them on trial to prove that they have the right to continue living in the same universe! This is the continuing mission of the FSS Brazen: to recklessly go where plenty of people have probably been before… and hope that nobody gets too upset to start major interstellar war! This is the set-up for Beam Me Up, a scenario and mini-supplement for ACE!—or the Awfully Cheerful Engine!—the roleplaying game of fast, cinematic, action comedy. Published by EN Publishing, best known for the W.O.I.N. or What’s Old is New roleplaying System, as used in Judge Dredd and the Worlds of 2000 AD and Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition, where previous entries in the series have tended to be one-shot, film night specials, here the given scenario (or scenarios) is more expansive.
Beam Me Up is very obviously and unsubtly inspired by the Science Fiction franchise, Star Trek. Which has the advantage of making everything in Beam Me Up more than a little familiar to most people. As with other supplements for ACE!, it very much wears its inspirations on its sleeve—or in this case is that on its spandex one-size too small, but still fits all, jumpsuits? Whilst a player may find it just a little too familiar, he will also find the genre and setting very easy to grasp. Similarly, as with other supplements for ACE!, a set of pre-generated characters is available to download to use with Beam Me Up, but the players can create their own. Several new roles are suggested. These include Captain, Chief Engineer, Comms Engineer, Hologram, Gunner, Ship Counsellor, and Pilot. The simplicity of the ACE! system means that whilst Beam Me Up defaults a mish-mash of elements drawn from across multiple different iterations of the Star Trek franchise, the Game Master and her players could easily adjust their game to fit whichever era of the setting that they want to game in.
Given that this is a Science Fiction roleplaying game involving starships and high technology, there are some details on its role in the game. The setting is post-scarcity, starship crews can replicate almost everything bar weapons of mass destruction, and are usually armed with blazers, which they should mostly use with the stun setting. Also, translocators enable crews to beam up and down from planets and even move instantly within a ship. Beam Me Up also defines its starships and provides rules for starship combat. A starship has four stats—Science, Shields, Size, and Warp—typically rated between one and ten—plus ratings for Health, Defence, and weapons and damage. Where a ship’s stats are higher than those of a Player Character for a particular action, then they can be used for a skill check instead. For example, the Chief of Security might want to use the ship’s scanners, but his Smarts is lower the ship’s Science, so his player can roll using that it instead. It is a nicely little levelling effect and it highlights the fact that the Player Characters are aboard an advance starship. Combat is handled in a narrative fashion and each Player Character have a particular role when it comes to combat. Thus, the Chief Pilot will fly the ship, the Gunner will fire weapons, the Chief Science Officer will operate the scanners, and so on. Here Beam Me Up is underwritten, really relying on the skill of the Game Master to adjudicate the different roles and how they affect combat. Some pointers as to what the roles might do would have been helpful. Should an attack hit a starship, it will reduce the shields and then health, and once the latter has gone, the ship will suffer critical hits.

The scenario in Beam Me Up is in line with its inspiration, episodic in nature. Effectively, its three acts are separate and the first two can be run in any order (though they are written and presented in a simple and playable order). In the listed first act, ‘Shotgun Ali’, the FSS Brazen sets out on its maiden voyage and is sent to check up on a missing vessel, the FSS Independent. When the crew find her, they are suddenly attacked by the ship and then boarded! After driving off the super tough boarding party, the Player Characters need to return the favour and beam aboard the FSS Independent to find out what is going on. The second act is ‘Incident at Boredia I’ when on a trip visit the world, the crew’s weekly report time is interrupted by the appearance of ‘R’, an alien super being who puts the crew and the FLoP as a whole on trial. To do this, he drags a ship from the Kulkan Empire to Boredia I and the Kulkan Empire vessel has the manpower to invade and conquer the planet below. Effectively this is a test to see how the Player Characters and the crew of the FSS Brazen will react to the Kulkan interference. Lastly, in act three, ‘Gunfight at the Brazen Corral’ in which the Player Characters get trapped in the holosuite and themselves cast as members of the Clanton-McLaury gang an hour before they face Virgil, Wyatt, and Morgan Earp, and Doc Holliday on October 26, 1881. Events occur again and again until the Player Characters can spot and break the pattern and find out who or what is responsible.
None of the three acts are connected except for the FSS Brazen and the obvious inspiration. For example, ‘Shotgun Ali’ is drawn from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan; ‘Incident at Boredia I’ is inspired by ‘Encounter at Farpoint’, the pilot for Star Trek: The Next Generation; and ‘Gunfight at the Brazen Corral’ is based on ‘Spectre of the Gun’ from the original Star Trek. These are not the only Science Fiction references in Beam Me Up, but they are, of course, the big ones. Both the Game Master and her players will have fun spotting the rest, likely groaning at them, as they appear.
Physically, Beam Me Up is a bright and breezy affair. The artwork is decent and the supplement is well written.

Beam Me Up veers widely between being cringeworthy in the broad parodying of its inspiration to actually being amusing. Part of the issue is not just the familiarity of the source material, but also with the parodying of it, so both feel over done and not really all that funny. What saves Beam Me Up are the three different episodes which dig deeper into the source material and play around with it to elevate the humour a little. In some ways, Beam Me Up is the most accessible and the least accessible of the supplements for ACE!, being too familiar, too on the nose, its humour underwhelming as a consequence.

In the weird and otherworldly Bazaar of the Gods in Punjar, the City of a Thousand Gates, stand temples, chapels, and churches to gods, goddesses, and demi-gods of almost an unknown number. Cults and faiths have risen and fallen, been promoted and persecuted, banished and proselytised. One of these is the Cult of the Carnifex, dedicated to death and suffering, whose members were drawn from the city’s lowest castes. The sick, the mad, the crippled were welcome amongst its ranks and from them, the Overlord of Punjar picked his personal executioners. Thus, the chthonic rose in favour, a reminder to the city’s nobility of the transience and suffering of their mortality and perhaps their eventual fate. However, not all were prepared to suffer this, and thus, the priest, Azazel of the Light, led a band of the city’s finest young swordsmen from amongst the nobility, known as the Swords of the Pious, and set to cleanse Punjar of the profane presence of Carnifex and her filthy cultist adherents. They smashed the cult and toppled its chapel, but never returned from beneath the city where the true temple to Carnifex was located. Carnifex and her cult were all but forgotten, only the young noblemen of certain families being sent to guard the broken site where the temple to Carnifex once stood, though they have long forgotten why. There are others though who have not forgotten, the knowledge whispered of and even noted down. Now, a band of adventurers and ne’er-do-wells have come into the possession of a map that shows the location of the forgotten passage which leads to the ruins of the temple. If no one has returned from the temple in hundreds of years, then there is still the chance that its wealth remains. Can they find their way into the underground temple, penetrate its secrets, survive its dangers, and return as wealthy men and women?

This is as much set-up as there is for Dungeon Crawl Classics #70: Jewels of the Carnifex, the fourth scenario to be published by Goodman Games for use with the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game. Designed for a group of six to ten Third Level Player Characters, it is an important scenario for four reasons. One is that it is the fourth scenario to be written for the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game and the third to be written for Player Characters who are not Zero level, and the third is that it is the first scenario for Third Level Player Characters. However, it is also important because in tone and setting, the scenario is clearly inspired by tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. It even admits this at the end, suggesting that the Judge read ‘The Two Best Thieves in Lankhmar’. Even though this scenario was published five years before the Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar Boxed Set, it feels like it would fit right into a Lankhmar campaign. Being designed for Third Level Player Characters for standard Dungeon Crawl Classics play, it is probably too tough an adventure, given the comparitive lack of healing and magic in Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar, for similar Level Player Characters, but adjust that and the Judge will have a fine addition to her campaign. That aside, whether the Judge decides to set it in the city of Lankhmar or not, Dungeon Crawl Classics #70: Jewels of the Carnifex is still a great Swords & Sorcery-style scenario.
The Player Characters have the opportunity to learn a rumour or two before following the map to the temple’s location and finding their way inside. What the Player Characters find below is a trap- and puzzle-infested complex, much of it overgrown with rotting vegetation—the scenario pointedly notes the smell—and occupied by the Swords of the Pious, twisted by their long existence inside the temple complex and exposure to the power of Azazel of the Light. Even getting to the temple entrance is challenging, across a chasm and through a waterfall of effluence from a broken sewer pipe! There is a lovely sense of decrepitude to temple. Not just the prevalent layers of matted and rotten vegetation hanging from the ceiling and along the walls, but partially collapsed rooms where the Player Characters might be able to dig something out of the rubble, hopefully without setting off a further collapse, and riding an avalanche of collapsed saints’ skulls downstairs to a lower room! What is interesting at this point is that the adventure does not make the finding of the secret door to the next level above, a mechanical roll. Rather, ways are suggested as to how the Player Characters might find it, whether Elf, Dwarf, or another Class, but ultimately lets them find it. This is because the point is not to find the door, but have then open it. This requires the solving of a puzzle, actually a fairly simple puzzle. However, there is another exit and that leads to a room of further exits, but all trapped. So essentially, the Player Characters are punished—though punished with some entertaining little encounters, but punished nonetheless—for taking the obviously easier option, but rewarded where the players have to think a little. It is a feature that occurs again later at the end of the scenario. Obviously, the room with the trapped doors are a diversion for anyone foolish enough to break into the temple, but not experienced in ways in which this tomb-like complex is designed.
If there is a sepulchral feel to the complex and Dungeon Crawl Classics #70: Jewels of the Carnifex in general, but the Swords & Sorcery aspect of the scenario delightfully twists the antagonists here. Whilst her cultists are long dead, Carnifex herself, remains imprisoned, and if the Player Characters manage to free her, she is revealed as icily alluring, yet unsettling, a goddess who will actually reward them before she leaves the temple. The Swords of the Pious are the loyal, but physically twisted servants of Azazel of the Light, who unbeknownst to them, are his victims. Trapped in the temple because of his power, a power that he was unwilling to give up and sacrifice himself to permanently seal Carnifex in the temple. Certainly, Azazel of the Light will fight to prevent this from happening in what likely to be the scenario’s big set-piece battle. There is a handy description of the tactics used by the Swords of the Pious—they are no fools, and Azazel of the Light even has his own Critical Hit Table!
The outcome of the scenario is, of course, down to the action of the Player Characters, but all of the options are covered. Also discussed is the possibility of the Player Characters exiting the temple with a lot of treasure. The advice for handling this is very good, basically using the wealth to drive further stories rather than something that the Player Characters can go on a mad shopping spree with. In addition, there are some terrific treasures and magical items to be found in the scenario, many of them dedicated to Carnifex, so looting them may not necessarily be the wisest option, but it does lend itself to further encounters with both her and worshippers from outside of Punjar.
One issue with the scenario is that there are relatively few opportunities for roleplaying. In fact, beyond a madman whom the Judge will have immense pleasure in portraying, the only NPCs who will talk with the Player Characters are Azazel of the Light and Carnifex. This is a very action and exploration orientated scenario.
Lastly, Dungeon Crawl Classics #70: Jewels of the Carnifex, a separate, smaller adventure unconnected to the first. This is ‘Lost in the Briars’. Again, written for Third Level Player Characters, this takes place in the Briarwood Deep, a forest near the village of Garland’s Fork. A thick bramble wall has surrounded the forest and both villagers and travellers, as well as local animals, have begun to go missing. This is due to Nockmort, a treant poisoned and twisted by the forces of Chaos, wanting to take his revenge on anyone and everyone and complete a ritual which will see him elevated into a god! There are some great scenes here, such as animated trees passing humans and animals from one to another like a line of firemen (who will throw them at the Player Characters if they attack), cowardly bandits wanting to get out of there, and a decidedly unhelpful hermit! There is the hint that the scenario is connected to The Sunless Garden (both are by the same author), but this is not developed. Otherwise, this is a short, little forest crawl that is easy to add to a campaign and a very enjoyable bonus scenario.

Physically, Dungeon Crawl Classics #70: Jewels of the Carnifex is a very nicely done book. The maps are good—for both adventures—and the artwork is excellent. That of Russ Nicholson really stands out, giving the scenario a profane feel whilst the depiction of the Player Characters is slightly grubby and desperate. 
Dungeon Crawl Classics #70: Jewels of the Carnifex is a really enjoyable, really good Swords & Sorcery, Conan the Barbarian or Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser-style tomb (temple)-robbing scenario, nicely detailed with some suitable genre twists. It should challenge any party of Player Characters, but the risk is worth it as the reward will make them wealthy, if only for a while.